HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
The fact that you have used a relative path here means that the
bookings.php
file must be in the same folder as
the
bookings.html
file.
Don't worry that you don't actually have a
bookings.php
in your project folder. We are just going to pretend that
it's there and that it will create a new booking when the form is submitted.
To be able to process the data, you would need to write a program using a programming language such as PHP,
Ruby or Python, which is beyond the scope of this topic. If you are interested in learning more about server-side
programming, check out this Treehouse course by Jim Hoskins and Jason Seifer
ht-
The method Attribute
The
method
attribute is used to specify how you want the form data to be sent to the server. There are two ways of
sending form data,
GET
requests and
POST
requests. If you forget to specify a method attribute on your form, the
GET
method is used by default.
The GET Method
The
GET
method sends your form data within a URL. This method is commonly used when performing tasks that
just need to fetch existing data from a web server, such as searches or product filters on e-commerce websites. When
a user submits the form, the browser will start to create a new URL to send the user to. This will look something like
the URL below.
http://www.html5foundations.com/bookings.php?name=Joe%20Balochio
&restaurant=310%20West%2038th%20Street,%20NY
This URL has a number of different parts. Let's look at them in more detail.
The Domain Name
The first part of the generated URL is made up of the protocol (http://) and the fully qualified domain name
(
www.html5foundations.com
).
If you are using an absolute URL, you would have explicitly defined this domain name in your
action
attribute.
Should you be using a relative URL in your
action
attribute, the browser will automatically take the domain name
from the page the form is submitted from. For example, if your form is on the
www.html5foundations.com/
The Path
The path segment of the URL represents the path to the file that will process the form data. I have highlighted the
path segment of our example URL in bold.
http://www.html5foundations.com
/bookings.php
?name=Joe%20Balochio
&restaurant=310%20West%2038th%20Street,%20NY
The URL Parameters