Welcome to this course on forms. I'm super, super excited. I'm amped. I hope you are too.
But, you know, before I get too excited, let's just take a step back and let's understand what forms
are. We've all seen a form on the web.
We've all used one, but very few of us have coded them and even fewer of us understand them in a lot
of detail.
And that's what this course is all about.
So I'm super, super excited.
But let's just take a step back.
Most areas where you can input data on a Web page or an app, are created using HTML forms.
For example, we are all familiar with the text input box.
That's pretty much the stock standard input that you would expect in a form.
But there are a plethora of others, which we're going to cover in this course.
Some of the most popular ones are radio buttons.
Hmm.
I like option two.
Radio buttons, by the way, allow you to only select one option of the selections.
But as we know, radio buttons are not the only type.
We've also got checkboxes, and maybe you fancy option one.
We've all seen dropdown menus.
And we all know about text areas where you can write something very cool.
Those are just some of the few form widgets that are available to us.
And once all of these kind of widgets or form controls are filled in, what happens next?
Well, usually the data is submitted to a server for processing and or storage.
That data has to be used in some way.
For example, you might want to store customer details in a database for later use, or sometimes you
want your app to be instantly updated after the user chooses a product to look at, or comments to view
on a blog post, for example.
But this is not to say that the data has to be submitted to a server.
In fact, sometimes data can be used on the client side to immediately update the DOM.
By the way, if you're wanting to know what the DOM is, please check out my DOM courses.
I've got two of them - a fundamentals course on the DOM and also a very advanced one,
part one and part two.
That's just a bit of FYI.
So what do
I mean, that data can be used on the client side immediately to manipulate the DOM.
Well, what about an example of a user adding an item to a list?
What about the user wanting to show or hide a UI feature?
These don't involve a database, well, not necessarily.
And because forms are so fundamental, they are often referred to as the money pages of a website.
In other words, they're how e-commerce sites selling products, how SAS companies collect payment for
their service, and how nonprofit groups raise money online.
In fact, many companies measure the success of their websites by the effectiveness of its forms because
they answer questions like, how many leads did our website send to our sales team? Or, how many people signed
up for our product last week?
And this often means that forms are subject to endless A/B tests and web optimizations.
Bit of a mouthful, but all I'm trying to say is that this course is going to allow you to master the
essentials of web forms.
However, for historic and technical reasons, it's not always obvious how to use forms to their full
advantage.
But don't stress, I've got your back.
This is what this course covers.
We cover all the essential aspects of web forms, including marking up the HTML structure, CSS styling,
validating form data, and we also touch on submitting data to a server.
In other words, I talk a little bit later in this course, especially later, because it's very advanced
on how we submit form data to a server. Whew. So just remember, take a step back.
There are two aspects to forms.
There's the front end to forms - the HTML, the CSS - and don't let that fool you.
It's very, very difficult. And there's also the back end, which is the server side.
And in this course we're going to predominantly look at the front end aspect of forms.
And like I mentioned, don't let this fool you.
Very few people fully appreciate how complex forms can be.
So I'm super excited.
I hope,
I hope I haven't scared you.
Don't worry.
That's what I'm here for. I'm here to help.
It's going to be a really fun course.
We're going to be coding many, many forms together.
So sit back, enjoy.
And I'll see you in the next lecture. (background music plays)