And so that's the basic idea of taking data from the outside world, key value
data from the outside world, using the HTTP protocol, and getting it into you.
Now, there is a more convenient way to enter data in, and
that's what we're talking about now, and that is using forms.
And I'll be honest, I'll just sort of step back in time a little bit.
This would have to be like, mid-1994.
And there was a time in '93 that there was this thing called Gopher.
And Gopher was sort of more impressive to most of us than the web was.
And the web was like, eh.
And so I'm like, eh, the web,
that's just another version of Gopher that's not any different.
And the first time that I knew that the web was cooler than Gopher was when
I saw my first form and I'm like wait a second, now we can actually type data and
hit the Submit button.
And the first form I saw was from FedEx.com and it was pretty much as simple
as this and it just said enter the tracking number, you click a button and
then it went into the tracking database and showed the tracking information.
Early days of the web, really simple user interface but I'm like [SOUND] mind blown.
And of course, you don't care.
The web's here.
Forms are a thing we do.
We log in with them, we search with them, we do all kinds of things with them.
And so this is the basic mechanism of creating a screen that's not just a screen
for you to read, but a screen for you to put things in, and then submit that data.
And this is sort of the simplest version of that thing we've got.
So just HTML, it's not PHP.
So we have a paragraph tag, and
we have a form tag that says these things are grouped together.
So these things are submitted together as a group.
You have a series of input tags, dot, dot, dot, dot, and you have some text.