Ah, web forms. A fascinating subject, really.
But first — why should anyone care about web forms? What could be more boring than a form?
Let's see.
We now live in an always connected world. Network devices are everywhere — on our desks, in our pockets, even on our wrists. The entire wealth of the human knowledge, every book, every reference, every business, every service — all of it is just a click away.
Internet changed the way we communicate. Internet changed the way we order products and services. Internet changed the way we get information. And Internet is interactive. Not only we read it — we click it, we touch it, we type on it. We give our words and data to it. But how?
Forms.
Every one of us fills out at least one online form each day. Some of us — many, many more. Be it an Amazon order, a ticket search, an appointment, a Facebook post — the way we give our data to apps and websites is through forms.
Forms are very important.
The dawn of the online forms is a bit murky. Original version of the HTML — the hypertext markup language invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 that essentially launched the web — did not include any provisions for any data input through web pages. Tim, being a physicist, was mostly concerned about cross-referencing research papers and making research files available for download to individual computers around the world. Webpages were read-only.
It wasn't until Netscape stepped into the game with their Mosaic web browser that web forms made their first appearance. It happened in 1993. HTML form tags were officially included in the HTML 2 specification in 1994.
Web forms — as we know them — were born.
From that point in history, web forms spread out from website to website to facilitate most Internet functions we use daily and take for granted. Search, logins, shopping, social — all of these essential online services would not be possible without web forms.
Web forms are everywhere.
It is almost impossible to imagine a website today without a single form on it. Be it a quick search form on a blog, contact form on a small business website, order form on a shopping site, post form on a social portal — every website needs forms to function.
Orders, subscriptions, appointments, registrations, bookings, donations, signups, feedback, customer service — all these essential functions of business, education, non-profit, and personal websites are powered by online forms.
Many tools have been built over the years to address complexities of web design and website development. And while content publishing has been made relatively easy now — mostly with big help from social media platforms such as Facebook — online forms remain anything but.
Online forms present unique challenges — not only it is hard enough to build a form with all the input validation and data constrains that are usually required in a real world use-case scenarios, web forms also present unique technical difficulties related to forms submissions. Submission data needs to be recorded, stored, processed, emailed, made searchable and exportable. This is not easy.
Payformix aims to solve this problem by offering a revolutionary simple approach to form building and form submissions management. Simplest. Easiest. Fastest.