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Yet another type of input is HIDDEN
input.
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="FORMNAME"
VALUE="Friend Form 1">
A HIDDEN input is a name/value pair that is
returned to you but does not show up anywhere on the web page.
The hidden input above is needed for use with Mailto Formatter.
It is how MTF recognizes the forms it's supposed to parse.
Let's suppose you were a company trying to generate leads for
a new product. You have a standard form for gathering
information... name, company, phone, products interested in,
etc. The only problem is there are 6 slightly different versions
of the form in 6 slightly different places. You need to know
what's coming from where. What to do?
You could add a HIDDEN input to your forms like
so...
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="FORMNAME" VALUE="Version
1"> ...for the first version
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="FORMNAME" VALUE="Version
2"> ...for the second version
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="FORMNAME" VALUE="Version
3"> ...for the third version
And so on and so forth.........!.
By the way, it doesn't matter what the name/value pair in the
hidden input is (or any input for that matter). I have
just been using "FORMNAME" because it saved
me some typing. This would be a perfectly legitimate HIDDEN
input...
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="E"
VALUE="Mc^2"> ...You would get back E=Mc^2
HIDDEN inputs are also useful for cgi scripts. For
example, many Internet Service Providers have a script you can
have your forms sent to. It then spits the form back to you all
nice and neat and ready for human consumption. The hidden input
tells the cgi script who you are, where to send the parsed data,
etc.
Last on the list are the SUBMIT
and RESET buttons.
They really are very simple...
<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT>
SUBMIT of course, sends the data...
...and RESET, clears the form.
<INPUT TYPE=RESET>
We can easily change what the buttons say.
<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Send
it away!"><BR>
<INPUT TYPE=RESET VALUE="Clear the
form!"><P>
If necessary, the SUBMIT button can also have a NAME.
You would need this if, for whatever reason, you had more than
one SUBMIT button.
One more little tidbit and we're going to wrap this up. When
you put a mailto form on your page and someone sends you
information, you'll notice that it is sent with a default
Subject. If you're visitor was using Netscape you'd get the
default Subject "Form posted from Mozilla".
Other browsers might send "Form Response", etc.
You can change this by editing what's in the <FORM>
tag as follows...
<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="mailto:knrfriends@yahoo.com.sg?subject=Our
friends in Koothanallur" ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded">
Pretty cool huh?
Well folks, that's it!
For this tutorial that is. You have learned all the major FORM
tags. There is a little more here and there, but nearly
all of what you'll need to do can be done with these tags.
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