forms are used to add another level of interactivity to your web pages, to allow communication between your viewers and your web site, to gather information, and to offer different means of navigation.
The role of forms is to gather different kinds of user input, i.e. fields to type in text, menus to select items from, radio buttons to choose items. The web browser takes this information, and wraps it up into a packaged format that can be sent directly to a web server, where there is a customized program sitting and waiting for the form information. These programs can unpackage the information, manipulate it, store data, and send a feedback page back to the viewer.
In the next lesson, you will learn how to write the HTML to display different form elements, like the ones displayed at the top of this lesson page. After that, we will show you first how you can make the forms work be emailing the content directly to you as well as how it can be processed with one of those web server ("CGI") programs. Finally, we will show you how you can use JavaScript to provide some of the same functionality as CGI programs, without having to deal with messy programming or running a web server.
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