a posting to alt.html listing forms tutorials

From: Jukka Korpela 
Newsgroups: alt.html
Subject: Re: need some CGI form-mailers ppl.
Date: 15 Jun 1998 11:04:50 +0300
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 43

Hell Hound <bsbhhound@aol.com> writes:

> I'm remaking my site, and I'm currently on the forms tutorial, and this time I want at least
> maybe 5 or 6 form mailers for it so ppl will have a fair amount of choice.

An interesting effort. A good tutorial on forms would be welcome.

However, it usually pays off to read a few tutorials before trying
to write one. For example:

href=http://www.cwru.edu/help/interHTML/

href=http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/HTML3.2/5.25.html

href=http://robot0.ge.uiuc.edu/%7ecarlosp/cs317/ft.1.html

href=http://junior.apk.net/%7ejbarta/tutor/forms/index.html

(All of these have deficiencies of various kind. But anyone trying
to write a new forms tutorial should read them at least cursorily
before starting. Mine wasn't even written to be a tutorial, rather
a reference, but people have used it as a tutorial, too.)

And naturally you should check the ultimate specifications too:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html

> http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/castle/2231/
> halted due to school - http://members.aol.com/bsbhhound/

Both pages would qualify into a collection of DON'Ts for Web pages.
And the very first thing you say in the forms tutorial
http://members.aol.com/bsbhhound/forms.htm
is in error; enctype="text/plain" is not among the encodings that
browsers are required to support, so it would be silly to rely on it.

Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas
( see http://user.tninet.se/%7edfr732s/show-off.html )

Oh, by the way, as you would find out by reading the tutorials,
there is a _large_ list of remotely services for forms handling, mainly
for getting the data sent by E-mail but also for more advanced
processing, at

http://www.cgi-resources.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Remotely_Hosted/Form_Processing/

-- 
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html