Forms and Why They are Never Emailed
Forms are everywhere on the web. A search box here, a survey there, a newsletter sign-up box everywhere. There is hardly a web site, hardly a page where no form is used. I counted at least three on this page.
While forms are coming out of the ears of every Web site, they hardly have arrived at mailboxes yet. This is quite interesting because
- forms are very useful and
- most email clients that can display HTML can display forms.
There are probably two main reasons why you will only scarcely have received forms in your inbox and why you most probably never have sent one via email. The one reason (the "deeper" one) is that
- the way forms are usually used on the Web does not work with email directly and independently.
The other reason is that
- there is no email client that has Insert | Form... somewhere in its menu.
If we want to send a form via email, we have to identify and solve the first reason and circumvent the second. So let's tackle the first problem.
