ADDING FORMS - HTML5 - page 282

GENERAL FORM ATTRIBUTES
h e form (think the mother ship) has several attributes that impact every input element in the
form container. However, the i rst focus is on the form itself. It has the following attributes:

accept-charset
action
autocomplete
enctype
method
name
novalidate
target

Many of these attributes are rarely used and some only make sense when you start using
programs like PHP and ASP.NET where you pass data to and from a database. However, we'll
examine them all.

Accept-charset, enctype, and novalidate
h e accept-charset attribute, if specii ed at all, usually assigns utf-8 as the character
encoding to be used with the form data. h at is, it treats all input as utf-8 encoding. A
simple statement like the following is sui cient:

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< form name =motherShip accept-charset =utf- 8 >

If no character encoding is assigned, it is assumed to be unknown and uses the default
character encoding. When using multiple encodings, each is separated by a space in HTML5
instead of by commas and semicolons as in earlier versions of HTML.

Most of the time, the enctype attribute is let blank and uses the default state. h e enctype
attribute has three keywords and states (keyword/state):

application/x-www-form-urlencoded (default)
multipart/form-data
text/plain

A form may be set up to accept plain text and would be assigned the following:

< form enctype = ”text/plain” >

For the most part, though, this is another attribute that is not included in the <form> tag.
h at's because the default ( urlencoded ) is what you want.