Learning Web Design Third Edition- P17:Everything you need to know to create professional web sites is right here. Learning Web Design starts from the beginning defining how the Web and web pages work and builds from there. By the end of the book, you'll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you'll know how to get your pages up on the Web. | The form Element Getting Your Forms to Work You don t need to learn to be a programmer to make working web forms for your site. There are a number of options for adding interactivity to a form. Use Hosting Plan Goodies Many site hosting plans include access to scripts for simple functions such as guestbooks mailing lists and so on. More advanced plans may even provide everything you need to add a full shopping cart system to your site as part of your monthly hosting fee. Documentation or a technical support person should be available to help you use them. Download and Install There are many free or inexpensive scripts available that you can download and run on your site. Just be sure that your hosting plan permits you to install scripts before you get started. Some script sources include Matt s Script Archive www. The PHP Resource Index PHP Builder PHP Classes Hire a Programmer If you need a custom solution you may need to hire a programmer who has Perl PHP ASP or other web-related programming skills. Tell your programmer what you are looking to accomplish with your form and he or she will suggest a solution. Again you need to make sure you have permission to install scripts on your server under your current hosting plan and that the server supports the language you choose. The action attribute The action attribute provides the location URL of the application or script sometimes called the action page that will be used to process the form. The action attribute in this example sends the data to a script called . The script is the cgi-bin directory on the same server as the HTML document you can tell because the URL is site root relative . form action cgi-bin method post . form The .pl suffix indicates that this form is processed by a Perl script Perl is a scripting language . It is also common to see web applications that end with the following .php indicating that a .
