[pmwiki-users] Input recipe

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Fri Jun 24 14:20:28 CDT 2005


Bronwyn Boltwood wrote:

> It isn't too hard to come up with markup that lets someone design the
> layout of the form and choose its controls.  What I never understood,
> though, is what forms do with the information they gather or how you
> change those settings.  How will we help people who've never worked
> with standard HTML forms (including me) cope with that?

That's exactly the point.

What a form does is this:

As soon as the user clicks on the "Submit" button, all the input 
controls in the form are asked for their current value. Those that don't 
have one and disabled controls are ignored; for all others, the browser 
generates name=value pairs and submits them to the server.

The URL that the form data is sent to is supposed to be a script that 
accepts all these name=value pairs and does something sensible with 
them. PmWiki with the proper recipes installed could be one of them - in 
fact PmWiki already is such a script, since the edit page is just such a 
form :-)

Since a script must be written or installed to interpret the values, 
forms are not for the faint of heart, nor for the casual visitor. 
(Unless said casual visitor has a script set up somewhere, and wants to 
feed his script with input from a PmWiki form. There are legitimate as 
well as illegitimate uses for such a feature.)

HTH

Regards,
Jo



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