So now you have all of these cool
interface widgets with which you can collect user-defined input.
But what do you do with them?
Well, at the end of your HTML FORM, you
typically add a "SUBMIT BUTTON".
Submit buttons are easy to implement
and take care of themselves.
When the user clicks the submit button,
the browser will detect it and will put all the inputted data
from the interface widgets into a URL encoded string and send it
to the script specified in the FORM's ACTION attribute (again, we
will talk about the script tomorrow).
A submit button appears below:
The code to create it looks like the
following:
<FORM>
<INPUT TYPE = "SUBMIT">
</FORM>
Changing the Buttons Label
You can notice right away that by default, the web browser will use
something like "Submit Query" for the button's label.
In many cases, you will not want that
default text in the button.
To change it, you simply use the VALUE
attribute of the INPUT tag as follows
The code to create it looks like the
following:
<FORM>
<INPUT TYPE = "SUBMIT"
VALUE = "Oooooh, Touch me!"
>
</FORM>
Identifying the Button to the
Server
In many cases, you may have more than
one submit button in a form. Thus, you need a way of identifying
which submit button is being pressed.
To do so, you will use the NAME
attribute of the INPUT tags.
In the following example, we create two
submit buttons with different names:
The code to create it looks like the
following:
<FORM>
<INPUT TYPE = "SUBMIT"
VALUE = "Delete Item"
NAME = "delete"
>
<INPUT TYPE = "SUBMIT"
VALUE = "Modify Item"
NAME = "modify"
>
</FORM>
We will talk about how the server can
use this information tomorrow.
