Notes

Interactive Forms

Notes: Interactive Forms

Click Here to answer a survey about this site.

Interactive forms are a great way to get feedback from a user or recieve information from a user.

The form on this site as a requirement of this site asks for feedback concerning the user's opinion.

Form design is important in usability. There are three basic parts to a form, the tags, information in the middle and submit buttons. Text boxes should be aligned and can be inside tables to keep it neat. Checkboxes are used only when the user can click more than one answer. Radio buttons are used only when the user needs to click one answer. A submit button should always accompany the form. It gets processed then feedback to the user.

The tags <FORM> and </FORM> are used in the HTML code.

EX. <FORM NAME="sample form" METHOD="post" or "get"

ACTION="http://...">Attributes of the <FORM> tag are -Name -Method -Action. If the form is outside the table tag, it workd better formatting and table tags should be in form tag. The value is what the user enters. Name is attached to value on form.

<SELECT NAME="favorite subject">

When looking at a hosting server: look for one that will allow /cgi-bin/ in order to get feedback from forms.

A form handler is needed to process the results, either to send it to a database and/or an email address. A good free form handler is Response-O-Matic.