Forms in HTML

This section describes how to create forms within your HTML documents. The results from these forms are returned to you as an e-mail by a process called form-to-mail.

Its pretty easy explaining how to put forms on your pages; telling you how to get them to result in an e-mail is a little more difficult. First of all, many access providers have special software for performing the form-to-mail procedure. These will require a slightly different method to that described here, so check with your access provider first. The method described here uses the mailto action to interpret the form. It is the simplest method, and produces only crude results (but they do the job!). On top of this I've explained all the usual dialog box stuff normally associated with forms.


Example Form




When the mailto action is used, as above, the results of the form are returned in a contiguous stream. This means the resulting e-mail from the above example form would look something like:

subject=Example+Form&age=under+18&name=Lee+Siddall
&email=lsiddall@mail.public.lib.ga.us&details=This+is+a+test
+and+only+a+test.&opinion=great
There is software available, such as that from Colosseum, which will parse the returned e-mails and present them in a more useable way.