You don't need JavaScript or Java applets or inline Shockwave movies to bring interactivity to your Web page. Nor do you have to hide your tangents behind links to other pages ... a world of possibilities opens up with just the basic form.

There are about a dozen different variations, including pulldown menus, scrolling menus, radio buttons, checkboxes, text areas, submit buttons, and reset buttons, on the form, but they all have a few things in common:

All forms begin with the <FORM> tag and end with </FORM>.

Every time you introduce a new <FORM> tag, the browser creates a new paragraph. So if you want a pulldown menu or a radio button to appear in the middle of a sentence, be sure to place the <form> at the beginning of the paragraph, not inside it.

You can sandwich multiple form elements (checkboxes, menus, etc.) between the same pair of <FORM></FORM> tags - so there's no need to start over each time you add a new one.

To make a form functional, you need to add a CGI script. .

There are four basic tags that begin to differentiate the various form elements:

<SELECT> creates menus, from which the user can choose one or more items.

<OPTION> sets off each menu choice; it's used only in conjunction with <SELECT>.

<INPUT> creates forms that collect simple data - such as checkboxes, radio buttons (each button gets its own input tag), and text boxes.

<TEXTAREA> creates multiline text input fields.