Re: Accessible Forms?

> I hope that this isn't a terribly ignorant question, but I'm interested
> in putting forms on my department's web site, and I'm worried about how
> to make the forms accessible. Is that possible? 

As Charles McCathieNevile noted, forms are already accessible in most of
the modern browsers (Netscape 1.0 up and IE 3.0 up - just out of
curiosity, were there any IE browsers prior to 3.0?).  For the browsers
that don't recognize forms (I'm not familiar with them, but I know they
exist), the most viable solution would be to provide and e-mail address
to send the information too.  A note can be included in the form
instructions to this effect.  Whether the form appears in the browser or
not, the names of the fields you've coded in straight HTML text will
appear.  That way, the user will know what information is being
collected and can send this info via e-mail.

>I was planning on using
> FrontPage to do it, but I gave up on FP when I ran into formatting
> problems with it's import feature. I will probably end up writing the
> forms in VB Script. Any ideas or URLs with info about this would be very
> helpful. Thanks!

I don't use FrontPage to code HTML.  I mostly code using a text editor. 
I have recently started using Allaire Home Site to do some of the grunt
work and Dreamweaver has done wonders as well.  Your message seems to
indicate that you haven't included forms in your site before and you
haven't developed scripts to process the information gathered in the
form.  Consequently, I would recommend doing some reading on both form
creation and scripts to process the data (CGI primarily).  I would
suggest you start at:
http://www.halcyon.com/sanford/cgi/cgi-tour.html  I don't think this
page covers using CGI to e-mail information collected through a form. 
You'll probably want to check out Matt's Script Archive (FormMail) to
get info on this. The address is: http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/

Good luck and let us know if you need more guidance.

Raymond Simmons
Technical Consultant and Programming Specialist
..........................................................
Terra Incognita Interactive Media
www.terraincognita.com

318.443.7833 Telephone
318.443.6123 Facsimile

Received on Wednesday, 10 June 1998 09:38:00 UTC