For the remainder of the lab, I'd like you to construct a form using HTML tags. I'd like this to be open-ended. You can make any form you want as long as it uses selection menus, textareas, text input fields, radio buttons, check boxes and of course has a submit button. Last year's students seemed to have no trouble selecting topics for their forms. Feel free to be serious or silly about this as the spirit move you.
At the end of the writeup, I will give you instructions on how to set things up so that you will actually see how people fill in your form. You may find this more interesting than expected. My daughter made such a form for a high school social studies class a year or two ago. It was a questionaire about school dress codes. While this may not seem like something that would attract a lot of interest, at this point over 1200 individuals have found the form on the net and taken the time to fill it in. The Web is a big place. If you put a form out there you may be surpised at the response you get (be patient though).
In building your form, remember that you can intermix form input elements with HTML tags for list, tables, etc. Be imaginative in using these tags to lay out your survey.
The "Forms" sub-menu under the PageSpinner "Tags" menu provides items that can be used to add form element tags to an HTML file (of course, you can always just type them in directly). When using the PageSpinner dialog boxes, you must account for the fact that the first CGI script you will use with your form expects the client to use the "GET" method when submitting information. This is the HTML default. So, if you type your own form tags, just leaving out the "METHOD" attribute will be appropriate. The PageSpinner Form dialog box, however, uses the POST method by default. So, those who use PageSpinner's menus to insert a FORM tag must remember to set the METHOD to "GET".
Once your form is ready, specify
as its "action" attribute. This will send the data from your form to the script I have used in class that will simply send the form data back as a new HTML page. This will enable you to make sure everything is working as intended.http://www.cs.williams.edu/cgi-bin/query
Once your form seems to be working, change the METHOD to POST and change the ACTION attribute of the FORM to:
with your actual login identifier used as the last component. We have set things up so that with this ACTION attribute, each submission of your form will cause an email to be sent to you containing the information used to fill in the form.http://www.cs.williams.edu/cgi-bin/mail?your-cs-user-id
Leave it like this until we can grade it. Eventually, however, you may want to add a "hidden" entry to your form like the one shown below:
This will cause the CGI script used to replace the boring confirmation page it produces after the mail is sent with whatever page the included URL points to. Again, don't do this for a week or so. The boring confirmation is useful for us when grading your work.<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="next-url" VALUE="url-for-confirmation-page">
As always, place a link to your form on your labs page and make sure to include your name in a comment in the HTML file that describes your form.