Ask HN: How do i make a form usable?

1 point·redxblood··4 comments

Okay, I built my own webpage, but i have a form where users fill in data (name, address, etc) and then they click a "submit" button. I understand i need another language besides HTML and CSS to make the submit actually happen. I've heard of javascript libraries such as Node.js and jQuery, though sincerely i have no idea if they are what i'm looking for. What should i learn next in order to make my form functional?

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If you just need to get some data - maybe use something like this:

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/87809?hl=en

http://www.wufoo.com/

If you want to develop it all yourself, you'll need someplace for the submitted form data to go. This means building some software that resides on a server ... so you'll want to learn Ruby or Python or PHP or something like that to process the submitted data.

There's lots of online educational resources. Maybe check out http://www.codecademy.com/ where they'll step you through the basics of building a webpage.

I saw your links, but they're not what i'm looking for specifically.. I already have a form, but i don't know how to actually SEND the data to a server. Once the data is in the server i can process it. But how do i get it there?

This explains the basics. The "action" attribute of your form tag tells the form where to send the data. http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp

I see... So in your example, the data sent goes to a page called "/html_form_action.asp" How does the server process this information? I assume it uses a server-based language? Which languages are usable?

Sorry if i have a lot of questions. I understand it could be annoying.

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