what do form action and form method post action do

Question

I m reading a book on html development  which I m fairly new at  and despite the fact that the book just had its 1st publishing one month ago  Nov  2011   the author is an experienced coder and maybe using   for the action in a form is old school     Because I m trying to get the gist of the sample code and I cannot find an explanation of form action     despite searching for   lt form action     gt       on google  on SO  and in www w3schools com   Anyone know what the   action means for forms

User · Answer

The   tag lets you send your data to the same file  I see it as a three step process    Query a DB to populate a from Allow the user to change data in the form Resubmit the data to the DB via the php script   With the method     you can do all of this in the same file   After the submit query is executed the page will reload with the updated data from the DB

User · Answer

Action normally specifies the file page that the form is submitted to  using the method described in the method paramater  post  get etc     An action of   indicates that the form stays on the same page  simply suffixing the url with a    Similar use occurs in anchors   lt a href    gt Link lt  a gt  for example  will stay on the same page   Thus  the form is submitted to the same page  which then processes the data etc

User · Answer

Apparently  action was required prior to HTML5  and   was just a stand in   but you no longer have to use it  See The Action Attribute   When specified with no attributes  as below  the  data is sent to the same page that the form is present on   lt form gt

User · Answer

action    will resolve to the page s address  action     will resolve to the page s address      which will mean an empty fragment identifier   Doing the latter might prevent a navigation  new load  to the same page and instead try to jump to the element with the id in the fragment identifier  But  since it s empty  it won t jump anywhere   Usually  authors just put   in href-like attributes when they re not going to use the attribute where they re using scripting instead  In these cases  they could just use action     or omit it if validation allows

[html] what do <form action="#"> and <form method="post" action="#"> do?

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