Technology Tales

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Improving a website contact form

Published on 23rd April 2018 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

On another website, I have had a contact form, but it was missing some functionality. For instance, it stored the input in files on a web server instead of emailing them. That was fixed more easily than expected using the PHP mail function. Even so, it remains useful to survey corresponding documentation on the W3Schools website.

The other changes affected the way the form looked to a visitor. There was a reset button, and that was removed on finding that such things are out of favour these days. Thinking again, there hardly was any need for it any way.

Newer additions that came with HTML5 had their place too. Including user hints using the placeholder attribute should add some user-friendliness, although I have avoided experimenting with browser-powered input validation for now. Use of the required attribute has its uses for telling a visitor that they have forgotten something, but I need to check how that is handled in CSS more thoroughly before I go with that since there are new :required, :optional, :valid and :invalid pseudoclasses that can be used to help.

It appears that there is much more to learn about setting up forms since I last checked. This is perhaps a hint that a few books need reading as part of catching with how things are done these days. There also is something new to learn.

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