Submitting forms

Submitting forms

What different possibilities do exist for submitting the contents of a form? The easiest way is to submit the form input via e-mail. This is the method we are going to look at a little closer. If you want to get feedback without e-mail and want the server to handle the input automatically you have to use CGI at the moment. You would need CGI for example if you wanted to make a search engine like Yahoo- where the user gets a result quickly after the form input. He does not have to wait until the people maintaining this server read the input and then look up the information requested. This is done automatically by the server. JavaScript does not have the functionality to do things like this. Even if you want to create a guestbook you can't make the server to add the information automatically to an existing HTML- page with JavaScript. Only CGI can do this at the moment. Of course you can create a guestbook with the people answering via e-mail. You have to enter the feedback manually though. This is ok if you don't expect to get 1000 feedback mails a day.

This script here is plain HTML. So no JavaScript is needed here! Only, of course, if you want to check the input before the form is submitted you will need JavaScript. I have to add that the mailto- command does not work for every browser- but the newer browsers support it.

Do you like this page?

Not at all.

Waste of time.

Worst site of the Net.

You will get the feedback through e-mail by doing this. The only problem is that you will receive a mail that might seem very cryptic at the first glance. Sometimes all spaces are filled up with '+' and sometimes they are filled up with '%20'. So+this+might+look+like+this. There are some parser programms out on the Net, I believe, which will put the received mail in to a nicer format.

There is another nice thing so you can make your form elements a little bit more user-friendly. You can define which element is in focus at the beginning. Or you could tell the browser to focus on the form where the user- input was done wrong. This means that the browser will set the cursor into the specified form- element so the user does not have to click on the form before entering anything. You can do this with the following piece of script:

function setfocus() {

document.first.text1.focus();

return;

}

This script would set the focus to the first text- element in the script I have shown above. You have to specify the name of the whole form - which is here called first - and the name of the single form element - here text1. If you want to put the focus on this element when the page is being loaded you can add an onLoad- property to your tag. This looks like this for example:

Last changed: 11.May'96

©1996 by Stefan Koch