Forms

Attributes

Novalidate is an attribute that doesn't require a value; it just controls two states of the form. What it does is obvious from the name, preventing the HTML from validating required inputs, but the benefit isn't apparent at first. For one, you could maintain full control over validation yourself. More importantly, users can save and resume the form at any point without needing to fill out all required fields. Method is used to send the form data as get or post. Put simply, get passes values through URL parameters, and post passes values through the request to the form. Finally, action is used to specify the page to pass the data to, which could be the page itself. I couldn't find anything talking about how it also redirects to that page, but I'm fairly certain it does every time.

Elements

Fieldset is used to group together any elements in a form you want to, and they become separated both visually and functionally. Visually, a border is drawn around the elements, which allows for various styling opportunities. Functionally, you can specify the form the set belongs to if there are multiple on a page, or you can disable that group of elements if such limitation is needed. There's not much to say about the legend element because it just makes captions for fieldsets. One thing I guess I can mention is that it defaults with a little left and right padding since it's on the same line as the fieldset border.

Label

Obviously, labels signify what values go in what inputs, but they can do so much more. For one, they also help non-visual users figure out what inputs are for, not only via the text itself but also when they're in the input. Also, clicking on the label will focus on the input, allowing for a larger click area. Those two benefits are a result of how the for attribute works. If you use the same text value in the label's for attribute as the input's id attribute, they become linked.

Summary

Forms are fairly simple at the end of the day, but there are a lot of little conveniences we can take for granted. In addition, various choices exist for developers when they want to perfect the functionality of their forms. Not to mention, forms are an important aspect of some part of the majority of websites.