---
title: HTML: forms
slug: html-forms
published_at: 2020-07-25 17:00:06 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:53 +0000
summary: 
description: 
tags: []
views: 1049
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/html-forms
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_UE13mWjAA
youtube_id: c_UE13mWjAA
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/c_UE13mWjAA
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c_UE13mWjAA/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# HTML: forms

*Published: July 25, 2020*
*Views: 1049*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_UE13mWjAA)

[![HTML: forms](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c_UE13mWjAA/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_UE13mWjAA)

## Description


## Transcript

all right our html page is continuing to grow and now we&#39;re going to add a form so let&#39;s look at what form what form elements are available for designing a form on our html page so a form as you may imagine has the tag form so we&#39;re gonna have an opening tag for a form and a closing tag for a form being uh form uh and then within the form we want to add controls they&#39;re often called form controls so the one one form control example is a text box input this is like you know you ask for someone to type in an answer to a question right so this is going to be an input and then we can set the type of the input generally the type of the input controls what we want the input to collect so we have a bunch of different uh intellisense things that are popping up here we can make it a button a checkbox colors dates date times the most common i would say is text so we&#39;re going to start with text and work from there an input is one of the types of html elements that is self-containing so it does not need to have an opening and closing tag it&#39;s itself just a single tag so let&#39;s save the page and look at what that looks like so we have just now a single form input element now let&#39;s talk about this this element so by default right we we don&#39;t right now we don&#39;t see any other information about the this element telling us what we should be typing into this field so there&#39;s another element type called a label so we can add a label to this text element or near the text element and we might say like what is your favorite disney um disney character okay we&#39;ll save and then when we refresh the page we see what is your oh i spelled it wrong what is your favorite disney character and when we refresh we can see that label next to the text input but right now one of the affordances that we&#39;re missing is that if if our pointer doesn&#39;t land exactly in the text input it&#39;s hard to grab focus on the input so when you um when you&#39;re when you&#39;re clicking around the browser and you&#39;re not clicked within the text input you can&#39;t really type into the text input unless you know how to set the focus so setting the focus means that the cursor is inside of the text input and when we focus on it right now you&#39;ll notice that the color around it turns blue so that&#39;s one of the affordances telling us that the text input is focused and we were only able to focus that by clicking directly on the actual text input so one thing we can do if we want to make um to improve the experience here we can add uh we can set an attribute on the label that says this label is for this specific input so we can say 4 and then the id of the input so we might we might set an an id on the input um char answer um and then four is going to be the same id char answer so all html elements can have an id attribute the id attributes of all html elements on the page should be unique so we should never have another element on the page that has this exact same id attribute that&#39;s really important and especially when targeting with css we want to make sure that every single element on the page has a unique id none of them should be the same across multiple elements there&#39;s another uh there&#39;s another attribute called class and that is a way that you can set a class value on an element um you can apply that to any html element and a class can be shared between multiple elements so multiple elements could have a a class of like blue or a class of you know rounded corners or something you could you could set the class to something that if you want to target it but right now we&#39;re using the id attribute and the four attribute on label to target this input element what this does is this allows us to click on the label to gain focus on the input notice that if i click on the label now it is setting the focus on the input so that i can type in an answer and it&#39;s obviously mickey um yeah okay so that is one example of a form control is a text input now there&#39;s a ton of different attributes that you can use with inputs and i want to show an alternative to having your label target this field so one alternative to setting the four attribute on the label and the id of the label is rather than setting your label as a sibling to the input you can wrap your in your input inside of the label so i&#39;m going to move the close tag after the input tag so now we have form and its child is label and inside of the label its child is some text content and the input element so if i save that and refresh the page this is another way that you can have it so that your text your or so that your label clicking on your label targets that input box and then allows you to focus the input when clicking on the label so that&#39;s just another way to add focus a couple other input controls here that i wanted to show we might have a date um we might have yeah let&#39;s show like when what is your birthday um what is your next uh i don&#39;t know party this might be a date time okay so if we refresh those we&#39;ll see what these controls look like what is your birthday that gives you you know a specific date and you&#39;ll notice that like just because we set the input type as date we get special controls in the browser so now we can pick a date so our birth date is july 6th when is your next party this one is not working as expected date let&#39;s see date time that should be a control that gives us access to show the date time but it&#39;s not popping up any special controls in chrome so let&#39;s add another that is maybe a number and you&#39;ll notice that we have now these up and down arrows that we can use text number is pretty cool you can have step maybe your step is 100 so that means like every time i hit the up arrow it goes up by 100 or down by 100 you can have a min of like negative 500 and a max of like 1000 or something so then if you refresh the page and you go up to a thousand you can&#39;t go above a thousand and you can go down as far as negative 400 and that&#39;s it so a number input is great um it helps you control and confine to just numbers you might also have an email input an email type input which will validate that the the content is actually an email alright so we kind of got out of control here when&#39;s your next party um you know like uh how many dogs do you have uh you can you can only have a hundred or or less than a hundred yeah like what it like what&#39;s your email address right okay so we have all these form controls they&#39;re super ugly because they&#39;re not they&#39;re not styled at all and there&#39;s no spaces between them but in practice you would style this with css to make it so that your you know each of your inputs are on their own lines um and then at the end we always we almost always will put a button to submit the form so here we might want to say create a button that says submit and then if we refresh the page we can see this big submit button okay so this is kind of the basics for laying out your form right so we have labels we have inputs a couple more here so let&#39;s talk about how we can set a a bigger text area that&#39;s not just a single text input so there is a separate control or a separate separate html tag called text area which allows you to collect a full like paragraph style text see so this is this is your text area um let&#39;s see like uh like tell us about this video okay so we refresh the page and that gives us some instruction to like actually populate this thing so you in here we might say something like calls um calls equals 10 rows equals 10 20. sure refresh the page and that gives us uh 10 10 columns and 20 rows so you know you might you might play around with this to make it look you know the size that you would expect someone to need to type in the content that is required for whatever the field is that you are collecting data for so that is a text area we also have check box so we might say something like we might say something like input type equals checkbox and the you know the let&#39;s see so like uh what do we want to do here we want to say like apples what kind of food do you like maybe like do you like apples um let&#39;s let&#39;s add some vr here just to like make it a little cleaner um and then we&#39;ll put a br before our button okay so do you like apples do you like um you know bananas all right so we refresh the page so you can like both apples and bananas at the same time cool so another element that you might use is a radio button so input type radio and there&#39;s a hotly contested like normal mode versus dark mode um so there&#39;s only that you can only have one choice in that case right normal mode or dark mode and you&#39;ll notice that like if i right now as i&#39;m clicking on these typically radio input buttons are mutually exclusive whereas check boxes allow you to collect like click zero or all like zero to many zero one two three whatever whereas a radio button is typically yeah mutually exclusive so the way that we define the mutual exclusivity is by setting the same name across all of the radio buttons that we are that we want in a group of radio buttons so we might say the name here is going to be like mode or something and we want the same name attribute on both radio inputs so if we save that and refresh the page now if we click on dark mode in normal mode we&#39;re toggling between the two rather than um having individual radio buttons right now they&#39;re working together by using that name element there are several other input types another example is a file so you might say like you know your profile pic or something and the type of this input is file and then we can allow the user to sort of like upload a file so you click the choose file and that will open your choose file dialog so that is that is another common control that you might come across when building html forms all right so digging into some more of the attributes that we can use on an input element um i want to just add some line breaks here so that we can see this a little better let&#39;s see okay okay okay okay all right all right all right let&#39;s refresh okay so now we&#39;ve got it we&#39;ve got a little bit better view so when we&#39;re talking about what your favorite disney character is there&#39;s a couple things we could do here so one is we can set the placeholder text and that is the content that will be filled in sort of in gray that in the background there so we could say placeholder is uh i don&#39;t know like lightning mcqueen or something and then if we refresh the page then that shows up in the background as a placeholder so that that text isn&#39;t actually like used and that&#39;s not the real value of the the html but or of the of the element but it like gives you an idea of what you might type in there so if you&#39;re asking for a name you might put you know john smith as the placeholder to um say like here&#39;s an example of what you might type in here another attribute that&#39;s really common is value so we might set the value to you know like um i don&#39;t know let&#39;s see what&#39;s another good disney character poo winnie the pooh right so if we set the value now if we refresh the page that is actual content that is pre-populated into the field now this this comes in handy when you are using a form to edit something so if you have some data that&#39;s in a database and you want to make a page to edit a blog post then you want to make sure that when you&#39;re loading the form it comes with the values that already exist in the database since you want to set those as the values the current values now this doesn&#39;t prevent you from changing what the value is in there it just pre-populates the value so that when the page is first loaded when we first reload the page the content is populated so that&#39;s what we can do with the value attribute on a text input now you might be wondering how do we set the value for you know checked check boxes and radio buttons so if we come back down here to radio button there is a special kind of attribute that doesn&#39;t actually require a value and one of those is a is checked checked so we just say checked we don&#39;t actually set it to a value or anything we just say checked and then when we refresh the page this will be checked by default so checked is an attribute that you can kind of just like drop in and you don&#39;t have to set a value and it will um take some binary action typically on the control that works the same for radio buttons so if we want folks to be defaulted to normal mode so this is kind of like you opt them in automatically to one of these two possible mutually exclusive options we can say checked and if we refresh the page we see that that is indeed checked another another thing that we might want to do with a field is disable it so um you know like for this what is your favorite disney character if we want to hard code poo and then never let anyone ever change what that is we might say disabled um and then we can refresh the page and you&#39;ll note that like this value is filled in that is a value it&#39;s not the placeholder but we can&#39;t focus this input because it&#39;s disabled this is common too if you wanted to like when a form is submitted if you&#39;re submitting it with javascript on the client or something and you want to make sure that no changes are being made to the form before the data is sent you might disable certain elements another common use is like if you want to limit the values that people are inputting but you still want to show them what value it&#39;s going that is going to be used you might set the value and mark it as disabled another option is like you might have data that is that you can set when you&#39;re creating an object or an instance of a post or something but you might not be able to change that data later and so in your edit in your edit form if you&#39;re editing some content you might want to show all the data about that content but if there&#39;s certain fields that were created that can&#39;t be changed you&#39;ll disable the field and then show that it&#39;s disabled another thing that you could do is mark something as required so that&#39;s another attribute disabled required if we refresh the page that will mean that if we if we try to submit this form it will say that this field is required so the browser automatically will know that just because we marked this field as required that when we attempt to submit the form that it&#39;ll ask us to fill in to fill in that field all right so those are some of the most common attributes that we might apply to the most common controls another thing i wanted to point out is that the form element itself has a couple of very important attributes that we want to talk about so the first one is action and typically with a form we are sending this data somewhere we want to take we&#39;re collecting the data from maybe a search input and we want to make sure that that data is being sent so that we can look up some results and then present those on the page or we might be collecting the data to create a blog post or to edit a blog post or to update you know update your profile or create a like or create a you know create a friendship with another person on your social network or something so we all we almost always want to send this data somewhere and that&#39;s the job of the form action attribute so this defines where to send the data now by default we&#39;re going to send the data to the same exact page we&#39;re sending it to the same route or the same path that we&#39;re currently on so by default this action is going back to itself so it&#39;s kind of like a loopback request typically we&#39;re going to add something here that&#39;s like createprofile.php or createprofile.aspx or something like this is going to go to a page that is accepting requests to create some data or to do some sort of search maybe it&#39;s uh you know search dot whatever um so these are going to be the the place where we want to send the data um okay so then we also have a method attribute so this defines the type of http request the the verb that we want to use for our http request so very commonly for creating instances of resources or for we&#39;re updating things we&#39;re going to use the post method so this is like i want to send some data to the server so get there there are two types of http verbs that are supported by forms by default in the browser and there&#39;s a there&#39;s a whole bunch of other http verbs that are available but they&#39;re not all supported by the browser so for instance we can&#39;t really say patch here or put or other other http methods head those don&#39;t make sense so we really have get and post and that&#39;s it and then a web server is going to interpret the data that was sent um to tell it whether or not this should be a post or a patch or a put or whatever but um you usually will have either just get or post so post means typically means that i&#39;m sending some data to the server get usually means that i want some data from the server i&#39;m trying to retrieve some data from the server and in the in the case of a form you might use a get for a search or for like filtering down a report or for you know kind of like retrieving some information that isn&#39;t really easy to grab just by like going to some url path so that you might use a form with it with a get option for just like kind of pulling back specific information doing a query to get information a post is going to be used for sending data to like create a resource or create an instance or create a document upload a file post is going to be used to like send data to the server so we&#39;ll talk more about http requests and response later when we talk about servers and building your building out your web server but for now that&#39;s kind of the difference and this is how you set the http method on the form all right in the next episode we&#39;re going to talk about a couple of more really rich media tags that we can use for videos and [Music] audio you

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