03 April, 2010

HTML forms in the early 90s

Before HTML forms used the <form> tag, there was a simpler mechanism called <ISINDEX>. I was reminded about this because someone asked why CGI examples showed urls without name=value pairs in the ?query section, like this: http://ive.got.syphil.is/disease-registry.html?pox

I then went to see if <ISINDEX> still worked in modern browsers. I discovered that in
Safari, it renders a box, but there seems to be no way to submit the query (traditionally, pressing enter would submit it). Lynx and w3m still support it.

From others, I hear:
apparently the default browser on the g1 doesn't even recognize isindex as some sort of input field, although it renders it as such.
sort of weird; won't let you type in it but it renders an input box

and Chrome is also reported to work correctly.

Anyway, this post has an isindex tag right here:



<--- there, so you can see how it works in your browser...

3 comments:

  1. This is rather interesting article. But you learn more about it here: html tutorials.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous16/4/10 20:07

    Also, now every older entry in this blog is in a <tt> font.

    ReplyDelete
  3. fix the tt - I had an unclosed code tag

    ReplyDelete