World Wide Web "forms" (or "fill-out forms") are the computer equivalant of paper forms we fill out all the time in everyday life, such as an application form. You will find a button or link at the end of every WWW form, often labled "Submit". When you push this button, two things are sent to the server: the data you've typed into the form, and an ACTION, which basically tells the server the name of the program which knows how to process that form's data. The server simply invokes that program and passes the form's data to it, and arranges for the output of that program to be sent back to the browser (ordinarily an HTML stream).

Common uses of forms are surveys, on-line order forms, feedback, or really any Web page in which input is required from the user in order to accomplish a given task or provide a service to the user.

Anybody who has access to a Web server for publishing HTML documents can create forms, since the form definition tags are just HTML tags. The tricky part of using forms is creating the "ACTION" defined for the form (the program which parses the encoded form data and then does something with it).

If you have a full UNIX shell account on the machine where your HTML pages reside and your system administrator has configured your Web server to allow you to use executable scripts with the Web server, you can write your own custom scripts and programs to provide the "ACTION" part of a form, (if you know how to program).

WebCom customers do not have the ability to write their own custom "ACTION" programs for use with ther WebCom account, as we do not provide programatic access to our server systems (this helps us keep security and performance at a peak, and prices at a minimum). However, we do provide a powerful and flexible ACTION program for forms for our customers to use, called the WebCom Forms Processor. This tool parses your form data for you and reads a configuration file created by you to determine what to do with the data (check the data for errors and reject it with a message to the user if there is a problem, accumulate it in a comma delimited file, mail it somewhere, insert it into an HTML document, etc.). This configuration file is optional; if you choose not to take advantage of the capabilities of the configuration file and do not create one for your form, the form's data is simply e-mailed to you in a structured format!

Here's a simple form:

WebCom customers can create forms to collect input from visitors to their site. Here's how:

• Forms Tutorial How to create your own forms
• The WebCom form processor - once you've created a form, how to create an ACTION for the form (that is, how to define what the server is to do with the form data when submitted).