Tutorial 13: Giving Form to Forms
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Menus with sub-menus
You can also group multiple OPTION elements in an OPTGROUP element to create a sub-menu within a menu.
The OPTGROUP element
- Context:
- Can only be placed inside a SELECT element.
- Contents:
- Can contain only OPTION elements.
- Tags:
- Both start-tag and end-tag are required.
Attributes for the OPTGROUP element
- LABEL (Text)
- A label to be used when displaying the sub-menu.
- Disabled control attribute
- Identifier and classification attributes
- Language information attributes
- Title attribute
- Inline style information attribute
- Intrinsic event handler attributes
OPTGROUP is not supported by any current release browser, but it has a sensible fall-back, since browsers that don't recognize the OPTGROUP element will just render all OPTION elements in the same menu, without any sub-menus.
<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/html/formdump.cgi" METHOD="GET" ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded"> <SELECT NAME="product"> <OPTGROUP LABEL="Windows 95, 98 or NT"> <OPTION VALUE="winserver">MORONS Server for Windows</OPTION> <OPTION VALUE="winruntime">MORONS Run-time for Windows</OPTION> <OPTION VALUE="windevkit">MORONS Developer's Kit for Windows</OPTION> </OPTGROUP> <OPTGROUP LABEL="Macintosh"> <OPTION VALUE="macserver">MORONS Server for the Macintosh</OPTION> <OPTION VALUE="macruntime">MORONS Run-time for the Macintosh</OPTION> <OPTION VALUE="macdevkit">MORONS Developer's Kit for the Macintosh</OPTION> </OPTGROUP> <OPTGROUP LABEL="Linux"> <OPTION VALUE="linuxserver">MORONS Server for Linux</OPTION> <OPTION VALUE="linuxruntime">MORONS Run-time for Linux</OPTION> <OPTION VALUE="linuxdevkit">MORONS Developer's Kit for Linux</OPTION> </OPTGROUP> </SELECT> <INPUT TYPE="submit"> </FORM>
OBJECT elements as form controls
HTML 4.0 contains instructions on how to use an OBJECT element as a form control, but this is currently unimplemented in all browsers I know of. The OBJECT element can be given a NAME attribute, but the value it returns depends on the specific object type, and to my knowledge no implementation yet exists that can do this. When and if such gadgets are invented, check this space for an update on how to use them.
