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HTML Forms as an Interface to Databases

One of the forces behind the development of the Common Gateway Interface was the desire to integrate databases with the Web. There are several alternative approaches, and the CGI is one of the most widely used. There are several advantage to the CGI approach:

And, of course, there are some difficulties:

This is where we start on the real HTML markup for forms. (Remember, this is only half the story- the other half is the CGI program.) We've already seen how the |<FORM>| tag works. Now we start creating ways for the user to enter actual data.

The user is perfectly free to add to, alter, or completely replace the contents of the input box if he feels like doing so, of course. If he does nothing to the contents of the input, then its predefined value will be used when the form is submitted. Sources of Additional Information


next up previous
Next: Further Information Up: Forms: Facilitating User Input Previous: An Example Form
Dave Marshall
9/28/2001