Forms are a way to allow interactive use of your page.
Forms allow the user to enter all sorts of information.
That information is sent to a script for processing. Forms must be used with cgi functions, HTML will only give the appearance of a form. In between you can have entry blanks, text areas, checkboxes, buttons, radio buttons and any usual HTML construct. Talk to your system administrator to find out about that. When the data is sent to the script for processing, every data element has a name.