From the course: Validating and Processing Forms with JavaScript and PHP

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Understanding forms

Understanding forms

Even though it might be obvious to some, I wanted to take a minute to review how forms are used on the web, how they're created, and what the different options for validating and processing them are. So let's get started by talking about what forms are for. Forms are designed to handle communication between the client, which is usually a browser, and a server, which hosts web sites and processes requests for information. It's a great way for your server to gather data about your user and do something in response to user input. Forms can let your user interact with data so that you can provide an interactive or customized experience. So, let's talk about how they work. You can interact with a form through a series of Input and Control Fields, like Text Fields, Check Boxes, Radio buttons and Drop Downs. The browser gathers the data from these fields and sends them to a processing script in a language like PHP or Ruby. The form processor receives the data from the form and does something…

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