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320 LESSON 12: Designing Forms

elements. That means when you start a form, a new line is inserted (unless you apply the

display: inline CSS property to the form tag).

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In older versions of HTML, form controls had to be placed inside

a <form> tag and then inside a block-level element to be valid.

But HTML5 doesn’t require either of these things. Instead, you

should use the <form> tag when you need to collect a group of

form controls and submit them all to the server for processing.

NOTE

Take a look at the following code fragment:

Input ▼

<p>Please enter your username <form><input> and password

<input></form> to log in.</p>

You might think that your entire form would appear on a single line based on the preced-

ing markup. As shown in Figure 12.4, the opening and closing <form> tags act like open-

ing and closing paragraph tags.

Output ▼

The two most commonly used attributes of the <form> tag are action and method. Both

of these attributes are optional. The following example shows how the <form> tag is typi-

cally used:

<form action="someaction" method="get or post">

content, form controls, and other HTML elements

</form>

FIGURE 12.4

A line break

inserted by an

opening <form>

tag.

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