HTML Form attributes

In the last post we discussed about the html forms, types of forms and show you how to create a simple form.Though form creation is an important step but forms are useless until they send the entered information to a specific location.In this post, we'll discuss the form attributes which determine the action performed by the form.
The two main and most important attributes of a <form> tag are "action=" and "method=".Lets discuss each of these two.

1. Action:When the user clicks the submit button, the content is sent to the server.The action attribute determines the location to which the content is sent.The file defined in the action attribute usually does something to the information which is done using the scripting languages.We'll not discuss that here. so, what does it look like....
   <form action="example.asp">
   Username:<input type="text" name="user"/>
   <input type="submit" value="submit"/>
   <'/form>
   
   And it looks like this in this blog....
   
   If you click the button then it will send the information to nowhere so it is just for practise.



2. Method:method attribute determines how the information is sent to the server.There are two ways to send the information.One way is to send information in URL variables(method=get) and the other way is to send information in HTTP post transaction(method=post).
   
   Difference between the two are:-

   method=get	method=post
   Appends form data in the url in name-value pairs. The length of the url can't exceed 3000 characters. Never use GET to send important information because that will be visible in the url Useful for non-secure data just like Google search query strings.	Appends data inside the body of http request. Data is not visible in the url Useful for sending secure/sensitive data. Form submissions with post can't be bookmarked.

Now when you have the idea and all the useful knowledge about creating a form you can try your hand in the notepad and can see what happens.The are other types of forms also such as chech-boxes, radio buttons, drop down list and mail-to form.To get info about those see our post on types of HTML forms.