Chapter 1. Introduction to Web Forms
How common are forms on the Web? Well, on a recent visit to the news site http://www.cnn.com, I counted six separate forms:
As a general rule, the more interactive a web site is, the more heavily the site's designers rely on web forms, a general term for all different kinds of technologies used to gather information from users. It is easy to see why this is the case without forms, web sites are far less interesting. Form-less web sites were the norm in the early days of the Web and provided a one-way deluge of static information, similar to the Sunday newspaper, which requires lots of navigation to get to any specific part and contains countless pages that get printed but never read. The addition of forms to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the primary language used in web pages, launched an entirely new way of surfing the Web. In this book, I use the term HTML forms to refer to the form element and related markup from either HTML or XHTML. Using HTML forms, searching for information became possible on a worldwide scale. Sites such as Yahoo! quickly became the most popular "portals" of entry on the Web. Later, as developers pushed the limits of forms technology farther, web sites became even more interactive and customizable. In return for a small piece of information, such as a postal code, the browsing experience could be reshaped to include what specific information visitors were looking for leaving out the rest. HTML forms have proven so successful in this regard that newer web technologies, such as PDF forms and Flash, have been unable to make a significant dent in their popularity. |
