HTML Forms are a way to collect information from a user via a web page and send that data to a program for further processing. It is not the intent of this class to teach programming or the handling of form data, but a simple program been provided to display the form data for class use.
In practice, you place special input fields along with regular HTML markup. A user may input data into the fields when browsing that page. When the user activates the forms submission button, the browser will place the form data into variables and send that information to the program specified in the form.
The program that actually does something with the data you collect on your form is called a CGI script, or Common Gateway Interface script. You'll also hear this type of scripting referred to as Server-side scripting, since the processing takes place on the server.
Many forms enhancements have been added to HTML 4.0, but since these are not widely deployed, we will concentrate on the form elements available in HTML 3.2.