More on that later. We are also specifying the POST method of passing data from the form to the server for processing. CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface and it is the way that web servers interact with auxilliary programs, such as programs to process the input from a form. This determines how the server will receive the information from the form. Briefly, GET places the form output on the URL in the query string.
POST places the output on the stdin of the CGI program.
We will use POST for our examples in class. For a more detailed discussion of GET vs POST, refer to the O'Reilly text, HTML, The Definitive Guide , by Musciano and Kennedy. There are several parameters that go with this tag. It says that the length of the field will be 50 characters and that the maxmimum amount of data you can put into that field is also 50 characters. It also is assigning the label of name to the field that holds the data.