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Limitations of forms

Forms were designed for capturing quite narrowly defined user input, but in practice are used for most user feedback on the Web. They lack many features of established data entry systems, such as some types of input validation (date or numeric only fields, and so on). Another limitation that is lamented on the Net is the inability to transfer files back to the server. The facility to specify names of files for transfer is under discussion and may be added at some future stage.

HTML does not allow the exact layout of forms to be specified. You can only use the normal HTML elements such as paragraph and line breaks. Some people enclose forms in the PRE element to give better control, but this allows for text in typewriter font only.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.