Reading 13 - corey-marchand/data-structures-and-algorithms GitHub Wiki

• The action attribute

This attribute defines where the data gets sent. Its value must be a valid URL. If this attribute isn't provided, the data will be sent to the URL of the page containing the form.

In this example, the data is sent to an absolute URL — http://example.com:

Here, we use a relative URL — the data is sent to a different URL on the server:

When specified with no attributes, as below, the

data is sent to the same page that the form is present on:

Many older pages use the following notation to indicate that the data should be sent to the same page that contains the form; this was required because until HTML5, the action attribute was required. This is no longer needed.

• The method attribute

This attribute defines how data is sent. The HTTP protocol provides several ways to perform a request; HTML form data can be transmitted via a number of different ones, the most common of which are the GET method and the POST method.

To understand the difference between those two methods, let's step back and examine how HTTP works. Each time you want to reach a resource on the Web, the browser sends a request to a URL. An HTTP request consists of two parts: a header that contains a set of global metadata about the browser's capabilities, and a body that can contain information necessary for the server to process the specific request.