The FORM Tag

The FORM tag specifies a fill-out form within an HTML document. More than one fill-out form can be in a single document, but forms cannot be nested.

<FORM ACTION="url"> ... </FORM>

The attributes are as follows:

ACTION is the URL of the query server to which the form contents will be submitted; if this attribute is absent, then the current document URL will be used.
METHOD is the HTTP/1.0 method used to submit the fill-out form to a query server. Which method you use depends on how your particular server works; we strongly recommend use of (or near-term migration to) POST. The valid choices are:
- GET -- this is the default method and causes the fill-out form contents to be appended to the URL as if they were a normal query.
- POST -- this method causes the fill-out form contents to be sent to the server in a data body rather than as part of the URL.
ENCTYPE specifies the encoding for the fill-out form contents. This attribute only applies if METHOD is set to POST -- and even then, there is only one possible value (the default, application/x-www-form-urlencoded) so far.

Inside a FORM you can have anything except another FORM. Specifically, INPUT, SELECT, and TEXTAREA tags are used to specify interface elements within the form.

Forms are not automatically visually differentiated from the rest of a document. We recommend using the HR (horizontal rule) tag before and after a form to cleanly differentiate it from surrounding text and/or other forms.