The FORM element is a container for a form. It doesn't actually do anything special by itself, but it can contain form controls that make up the form and are displayed for the user to manipulate.

The FORM element

Context:

This is a block element (but see below)

Contents:

May contain block-level elements and form controls. Cannot be nested.

Tags:

Both start-tag and end-tag are required.

Attributes for the FORM element

action (URI)

The URI that is used for form submission.

method (get or post)

The method used for form submission, get or post

enctype (Content type)

The MIME content type that should be used for encoding the form data when it is submitted. The default is application/x-www-form-urlencoded. An alternative is multipart/form-data when sending files (see below).

accept (List of content types)

A space- or comma-separated list of MIME content types that may be sent (as files) when submitting the form.

accept-charset (List of character sets)

A space- or comma-separated list of character sets that the form data may be in. The default is the character set of the document.

Identifier and classification attributes

Language information attributes

Inline style information attribute

Title attribute

 

Intrinsic event handler attributes

The descriptions of the various attributes may seem a little puzzling for now, because they have to do with how the form is submitted, and we haven't talked about that yet. Here's a brief explanation.