FORM
Description
The FORM element creates a fill-out form.
The browser permits the user to enter information in the fields of
the form and sends this information to a cgi-bin script on a server
identified as a by the ACTION attribute.
METHOD=GET (the default) appends the input information to the
ACTION URL which on most receiving systems becomes
the value of the environment variable QUERY_STRING.
METHOD=POST (the preferred) sends the input information in a data body
which is available on stdin with the data length set
in the environment variable CONTENT_LENGTH.
Form data is a stream of name=value pairs
separated by the & character.
Each name=value pair is URL encoded,
i.e. spaces are changed into the plus character and some characters
are encoded into hexadecimal.
At least one of the following is expected inside the FORM
contents: INPUT, SELECT, TEXTAREA.
Minimum Attributes
<FORM></FORM>
All Possible Attributes
<FORM ACTION="..."
METHOD=GET|POST
ENCTYPE="..."
LANG="..."
DIR=ltr|rtl
ACCEPT-CHARSET="..."
SCRIPT="...">
</FORM>
Elements Allowed Within...
members of group
and elements
but not element
Allowed In Content Of...
Any element that permits members of group
Variations
The original definition of FORM only defined the default value of
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
for the ENCTYPE attribute.
RFC 1867 adds the value of multipart/form-data
for this attribute to permit a FORM to upload one or more files
in addition to the FORM data. METHOD=POST is required with
this value of ENCTYPE.
This file upload extension is implemented in Netscape 2.0.
Most current browsers only handle ACTION for the
http: access type, but proposals for handling the
mailto: access type are being discussed.
The LANG, DIR, and ACCEPT-CHARSET attributes are introduced with the
internationalization proposal.
The ACCEPT-CHARSET attribute is to provide a hint as to the
character set or sets that the receiving URL is prepared to handle.
Version 3 proposes the SCRIPT attribute to specify a URL which
contains a limited syntax script to be downloaded to the browser
for execution to preprocess the FORM output before sending it
to the ACTION destination.
This SCRIPT proposal may change as part of the new proposals
concerning APPLET and EMBED.
All elements concerning FORM are Level 2.
