Unfortunately when the HTML was being designed for forms consistency was not a high priority. You will find that most form-specific tags are <input> tags, but there are several notable exceptions.

The main points to remember about forms are as follows:

a form starts with a <form> tag and closes with a matching </form> tag. Form elements (text fields, drop-down menus, etc) can be placed anywhere on the page, with or without a surrounding form tag.

The form tag has two attributes that are typically added: method and action.

A form’s method is the way the submitted data is passed to whatever will be processing it (a CGI script, a PHP script, etc). Often, this method will be post. Alternatively, the get method appends the data to the URL itself when it is submitted, which is obviously less secure (but helpful, if you are interested in debugging a form or bookmarking a page created through a form decision).

The action attribute of the form tag tells the form where to submit its data to. If a CGI script written in Perl was processing the data, the action attribute would typically be set to something like cgi-bin/form.pl. If a PHP script, it would be something like formhandler.php.

The first step in creating our form is the opening and closing <form> tags, with the correct attributes:

<form method="post" action="formhandler.php">
</form>

fieldset is a container element inside the form. Think of filling out your tax form at the end of each year: each major section of the form (personal information, employer, income) is divided into a seperate box. fieldset is that box in the context of a form. A form may contain multiple fieldsets.

Immediately inside the fieldset you should enter a <legend> tag, with appropriate content. The <legend> is essentially the label for the entire fieldset, and typically indicates the purpose of that section. (“Personal information”, “Mailing Address”, “Billing Info”, etc).

The complete setup code for a form is therefore:

<form method="post" action="formhandler.php">
	<fieldset>
		<legend>Legend for form</legend>
		<!-- form content goes here -->
	</fieldset>
</form>

fieldset and legend are optional, but they are useful elements.

Photograph by Manfred Huszar, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license

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