Hello there, yes I'm here again, all day, every day and twice on Sunday (well once if we're being truthful 😅). Today we're looking at something simple, we're looking at forms today. The average person thinks of SurveyMonkey, Google forms, Microsoft forms or some other longwinded forms they've been asked to fill.
FORMS ARE ONE OF THE BASIC FEATURES OF AN INTERACTIVE PLATFORM
In software development, forms are a basic yet demanding concept. Forms are the most common way of getting feedback from the user in order to enable the platform to interact with the user and provide a bespoke experience. The popular misconception about forms is that they're usually quite long. In software development, forms can be as short as one input box. By now you should start remembering some forms you use frequently (it's ok if you don't, you're why I'm here 😉). When you try to log into Hashnode or any platform, those input boxes where you type in your email address/username and password are forms.
A FORM LETS YOU SEND INFORMATION TO THE MACHINE
The basic definition for a form is anything that is built to accept user input, following that rule of thumb, every part of a digital infrastructure that lets you add your own input or determine what data is sent to the machine is more or less leveraging form properties. When you use the search bar to look for people, organizations or things either on Google, Hashnode or anywhere, you're making use of what is called an "input box" and it's part of the components used in building forms. Whenever you see a clickable thing that gives you a list of options to choose from (most commonly found when you want to choose country), you're making use of a "dropdown". When you see some set of options where you can choose multiple answers, you're making use of "checkboxes". When you see those option things where you can only choose one, you're making use of a"radio button".
FORMS ARE A KEY TARGET OF HACKERS
All of the components above should give you a rough idea of how ubiquitous form components and their use-cases are. Asides from being able to accept user data, forms are tasked with being able to verify and scrutinize said inputs. Those two input fields (username/email and password) you see when trying to log into LinkedIn might look so simple, however, a lot of times developers spend weeks trying to foolproof it, those two input fields are made possible by hundreds if not thousands of lines of code and this is because it is targeted a lot by hackers.
FINALLY...
Input fields are one of the first points of cybersecurity implementation, those rules that ensure you type a username in a certain way or a password in a certain way when you're trying to register on a platform are features that fall under the purview of "input validation" and is quite important. That feature that prevents you from accessing your account when you incorrectly type your password three times is linked to forms, and a host of other things that help protect user information and the digital platform you're accessing from cybersecurity threats. Forms look so simple but they're usually quite stressful for devs.