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The first HTML tag that you must understand
is the <FORM> tag that begins and ends an HTML form.
The first thing that the <FORM> tag
does is separate the interface widgets from the rest of an HTML
page.
Secondly, the <FORM> tag establishes
the relationship between the form and the server that will handle
the user-defined data.
Specifically, the form defines three
attributes that manage the interaction. These attributes are shown
in the table below:
| Attribute |
Description |
| METHOD |
Specifies the HTTP method used to send the request. This can
be either GET or POST |
| ACTION |
Specifies the URL of a script that will process the user-defined
data. We will talk about "Scripts" tomorrow. But for now, let's
just focus on getting user data to the server. Note that
if no action is specified, it will default to the current page.
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| ENCTYPE |
Specifies the way in which the form data is encoded before it is
sent to the server. This defaults to
application/x-www-form-urlencoded |
Thus, a generic <FORM> tag might look
like the following (Notice that we rarely use an ECTYPE attribute
since we usually want the default):
<FORM METHOD = "POST"
ACTION = "/cgi-bin/script.cgi">
</FORM>
Okay, so once we have defined out form, we
need to start putting interface widgets into it.
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