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5 Great Tools to Help You Build Your Own HTML5 Forms

Written By

Oct 13, 2017

5 minute read

The

element defines a form and attributes that determine the structure of this form. When you want to create an HTML form, you need to start using this item, inserting all the contents inside.

Many browsers can see the elements and can implement special shortcuts to ease their use. Be aware that you must avoid creating a form within another form! Forms contain cassettes, radio buttons, checkbox buttons, submit button, dialog boxes.

Through two distinct types of instruments, namely frames and Web applications, you can build amazing forms. Frames are layered structures that provide us with pre-built functionality and styles, allowing us the freedom to modify any predefined content into a modified one, according to each one’s needs.

The applications used to create Web forms provide an automated solution, incorporating a service that also accepts the catalogs in the submission form. During this article, you will learn some of the most important tools used for creating HTML5 forms. I’ll guide you through some of the form and resource design tools to help you optimize your Web form designs.

Bootstrap

HTML5 forms are totally part of Web pages and applications, but, sometimes, styling the form components manually using CSS is an extremely monotonous job. Bootstrap is a resonant name when it comes to creating Web forms. A major advantage of using this library is that you do not need to write CSS codes for a form. Another advantage is that it allows you to put labels inside the form and the form fields can be given any geometric form. Bootstrap is a very useful library, because it simplifies the process of handling and arranging the form controls through a predefined set of classes.

Bootstrap provides three different types of form layouts:

Vertical Form (default form layout)
Horizontal Form
Inline Form

The listing below creates a simple login inline form that uses the Bootstrap framework:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Bootstrap</title>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css">
  <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.2.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <script src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>

<div class="container">
  <h3 align="center">Inline form example</h3>
  
  <form class="form-inline" action="/action.php" align="center">
  	<div class="form-group">
      		<label for="username">Username:</label>
      		<input type="username" class="form-control" id="username" placeholder="Enter username" name="username">
   	</div>
    	<div class="form-group">
      		<label for="pwd">Password:</label>
      		<input type="password" class="form-control" id="pwd" placeholder="Enter password" name="pwd">
    	</div>
    	<div class="checkbox">
      		<label><input type="checkbox" name="remember"> Remember me</label>
    	</div>
    	<button type="submit" class="btn btn-default">Submit</button>
  </form>
</div>

</body>
</html>

The output of the above listing looks like this:

Also, if you do not want to take advantage of all the benefits of Bootstrap, uncheck everything from the download generator, except the forms module.

Foundation

Foundation is a responsive front-end framework. Sites built on Foundation work great on many devices like laptop, desktop, mobile phones and tablets. Foundation provides a responsible network and HTML components, CSS, forms, buttons, templates, and code snippets, interface elements and optional navigation elements and functionality provided by JavaScript extensions.

It has emerged as a Zurb project to develop faster and better front-end code. Foundation has been designed and tested on numerous browsers and devices. This responsive mobile frame, provides designers with best practices for rapid development.

Foundation is open source, and developers are encouraged to participate in the project and contribute themselves to the development of the platform. Example Foundation form (the below listing, creates a simple form that uses the Foundation, and contains: buttons, forms and templates

Listing 2: Create a Simple Form with Foundation

<html>
   <head>
      <title>Form Text Inputs</title>
      <link rel = "stylesheet" href = "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/foundation/6.0.1/css/foundation.css">
   </head>

   <body>
      <form>
         <div class = "row">
              <div class = "medium-3 columns">
               <h3>Example Form</h3>
               <label>Email <input type = "email"></label>
               <label>Password <input type = "password"></label>
	  <a href="#" class="button postfix">Go</a>			
            </div>
         </div>
      </form>   
   </body>
</html>