Little HTML help here

[Sunner]

How do I make a form with an action that consists of an URL to a php page with a variable sent along, such as <form action="blah.php?foo=bar>.
When I do it like that, everything behind the ? is ignored.

 

[Moonbender]

You need to upload the form using HTTP POST, not HTTP GET (which is the default). This works:
<form action="test.php?option=rawr" method="POST"> ... </form>

If you use GET, "option" will be killed, because HTTP GET transmits options by adding them to the URL in just that way. HTTP POST is a true upload. If you don't want to use POST for some reason, you can, of course, create a hidden field in the form:
<input type="hidden" name="option" value="rawr" />

That would do the same thing. Note that the way you access those variables also can depend on the way you let the user upload them - there's one superglobal array for each GET and POST, namely $_GET and $_POST. However, there's also an array $_REQUEST which takes all user-posted variables; if you use that, there'd be no changes necessary.

 

[Sunner]

Thanks a bunch 🙂

Oh, and while Im asking, another question
Is there any way to specify an image to replace that boring button with a custom image?

 

[Moonbender]

Yep.

<input type="image" src="foo.png" /> (HTML 3.2 style)

<button type="submit"><img src="foo.png" /></button> (HTML 4.0 style)

Note that the latter method is universal, you can enclose mostly anything by the button tags, but older browsers like Netscape 4.x don't understand it yet.

 

[Sunner]

Ok, one last question 🙂

When using the <button type...> tag, all browsers put the button image inside a "regular grey" button, making one very big, and very very ugly button with a smaller button inside.
I assume this is avoidable.

Oh and by the way, you wouldn't happen to know of a good HTML reference online, found a few when searching google, but they weren't terribly useful, if I had a good one, maybe I wont have to bug you 🙂

 

[Moonbender]

Hmm. I don't think you can remove the gray button (which indeed looks horrible) with pure HTML, but it's easy to remove it with CSS:

<button style="border:0; background-color:white;"> ... </button>

Tested in Mozilla, Opera and IE. Central CSS definition in the header or an extra file works fine, too.

As for the reference, in fact I do have an excellent online one, SelfHTML, probably the best I've seen so far - but unfortunately it's in German. I did a brief look in the Google category, this reference for both HTML4 and CSS seems to be quite solid, and it's in English, too. 😉