Web Forms

Fill-out forms or web forms are used to gather information from users. The appearance of the form is controlled by HTML and CSS, and the information gathered by the form is handled with a CGI script.

NOTE: These pages are designed for the intermediate HTML publisher. If you are not comfortable with writing HTML code, we recommend you review Learning HTML before learning to write web forms.

The HTML form is what the user sees while looking at the web page, it is created using the FORM tag, and may contain any of the following elements:

The examples on these pages are designed to show an example of the HTML element, the HTML code which created the element, the output generated if no changes are made to the form before clicking the submit button, and some notes about using the form field shown. You may make changes to the form and click the submit button to see how your changes alter the output generated by the form. Use your browser's "back" button to return to the example.

The examples are processed using a CGI Script called "generic.cgi". The script uses Perl to return name=value pairs for each element of the form. If you would like to use this script to test your forms, it is located at

http://www.utexas.edu/teamweb/cgi-bin/generic.cgi

For examples of web forms in use at UT, look at the Web Central Maintenance Forms. Use the View -> Source feature in your browser to examine the HTML source for these pages.

This brief summary contains a list of the tags used to create forms and the attributes each tag supports.