How to add functionality to HTML forms

Well, the thing is, 'submission' is already built in to the browser and the submit button is specifically built to tell the browser "ok, send this info somewhere!" and then the page refreshes... So, it's not the languages that allow you to 'submit' but rather the languages that allows you to build a script, have it on your server, and then use that script name to tell the browser WHAT to do with that information that's being 'submitted'. i.e. what script to send that stuff to.

Like, ok, you have a form and you've built it with several input fields and a submit button. You type stuff in and you hit submit. POOF! The page refreshes and it's all gone. It did go through the submit action it just didn't send it anywhere and it went nowhere and got discarded.

What you're thinking of with the PHP, Python, etc... is the script on the server side that you would send it to. And the answer is... any of those. You could have a PHP script a python script a perl script and now, you can use node.js for all that too.

When you have a form, you have those attributes of action and method, right? Well the method says what kind of submit you're rockin' (post/get) and the action tells the browser where to go to post OR get the information.

<!-- example using php-->
<form action="some-script-name.php" method="post">
    <!-- some form elements in here -->
</form>

<!-- example using python-->
<form action="some-script-name.py" method="post">
    <!-- some form elements in here -->
</form>

<!-- example using python-->
<form action="some-script-name.pl" method="post">
    <!-- some form elements in here -->
</form>

<!-- example using node-->
<form action="/someRefName" method="post"> <!-- someName sets a name that you can pass as a parameter in a function your refers to a function in your javascript file -->
    <!-- some form elements in here -->
</form>

So, your options are wide open as far as what you can actually use, it just depends on what you have running on your server that you're trying to communicate with.

But as far as the actual submission, that's just handled by the button/browser by default. What happens to the data after you hit submit, that's where you're using the server side scripts as a destination in the ~action~ attribute

Cheers,

Huck -

p.s. If anyone wiser and more experienced with this stuff sees some incorrect info in the above, please, by all means, correct it.

Thanks for all the great info so far, is it possible to submit the form to an email address like reception@company.com with out requiring some fancy back end code?