So, what exactly are web forms?
Well, first of all,
this is not a fixed term,
it simply is a term I use here
to describe a collection of HTML elements,
which we use to display forms,
input forms to visitors of our website.
And as I already mentioned in the last course lecture,
in the introduction of this module,
you can build all kinds of forms depending
on which website you're building.
But in general, most or at least many websites
are not just about presenting
or showing content,
which is what we did up to this point in this course.
We always just showed text or showed images.
But, most web pages are not just about that,
though it is of course super important,
but they also are about fetching user input.
And now here, it really depends on what you're building.
You could have a contact form.
For example, if you have a portfolio website,
you could have a contact form where other people
can contact you to book your services, for example.
You can have checkout forms,
for example, on Amazon.com,
where you enter your address and your credit card details.
You can have a website where users need to log in,
and therefore, you might have a login form
that allows users to sign up and log in.
You could be building a blog
where users can comment and share feedback in some way.
So then you might have a comment or feedback form.
And of course,
there are many other kinds
of forums you could have on your website.
In the end, it's simply about fetching some user data
for whatever purpose,
because you wanna ship some goods
to them because you're interested
in their thoughts and feedbacks,
or because you may be wanna contact them back
to start a business relation with them.
That's what forms are about.
And for building such forms,
for fetching that user input,
we've got a broad variety of HTML elements
and configuration options
that allow us as a web developer
to build those forms.
Now, as you will learn throughout this course section,
building the form and adding those elements is one thing.
There also are a couple of related concepts
which we'll have a closer look at.
For example, we can validate user input.
So we can force users to enter certain input values
and tell them that something is incorrect
if they entered something else.
A good example would be an email address,
which needs to be a valid email address.
Otherwise, we show an error.
And last but not least,
once all the data is entered,
it also is important that we do something
with that data once the form is submitted,
typically when a button is clicked.
And that is also something we are going
to discuss throughout this course section.