How Forms Work

You've probably been on the visitor side of forms many times: you enter your information in boxes on a Web page. Then you click Complete My Order and yourbrowser displays a "Thank you" page. Two weeks later, your new Guitar Artistry of Charo CD arrives at your door.

Now that you're going to be on the manufacturing end of forms, you'll need to know a bit more about the process through which that CD was dispatched to you. What's a form made of? And where does the information go once a visitor clicks Submit?

Pages that play host to one or more forms can look pretty complicated when you peek behind the curtain, but you're still dealing with basic HTML. A form is part of a regular Web page and consists ofsurprise, surprisea basic <form> tag. Within the <form> tag's opening and close, you'll add elements that make up your form, such as text boxes, pull-down menus, option buttons, and checkboxes.

When someone fills out and submits a form, the basic process goes something like this:

You've probably been on the receiving end of a confirmation message more than a few times. The process seems pretty simple, except for step 3. If you're not a programming expert, how do you get the Web server to process information like that?

No worries. FrontPage does it for you. You just need to set your options, and then the program takes care of the rest.