Chapter 18. Form handling
This chapter covers:
There was a system administrator at a university once who claimed that his job would be perfect if it weren’t for those pesky students. Except, obviously, the job wouldn’t exist if there were no students.
That’s what the real world is like. There are users, and they have to enter their personal data and all sorts of other information. Form handling is complex and tricky, but there’s no use in complaining about it.
Well, we could try blaming the HTTP protocol. From the point of view of a web programmer, the default behavior of an HTML form is inconvenient. The user enters some text into a form, clicks the submit button, and frequently returns to the same form. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the user wants the data in the form to stay there, but it doesn’t unless we program it to do so.
Making it simple and intuitive takes work. So much work that it’s hard to do the subject justice in one chapter.