Dynamically hide form on submit?

Question

Hello,

I am not a big web programmer, and have a friend who wants me to help him with something.

He wants to be able to have a form that once it is submitted changes to say something like "Thanks for submitting" and have the form info disappear. He wants it to be easy for anyone to use, so he can give it to various people to use on their sites.

I was thinking I could use javascript to do it, but not really 100% sure. I want to avoid anything that isn't HTML as much as possible so that it will be usable by as many people as possible.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Does he want a form that will magically submit to any backend (PHP, ASP.NET, JAVA, CGI, etc), or is he targeting some particular platform?

Answer 2

Try the jquery form plugin. This will achieve what you're after in an elegant way with minimal coding. In addition to this you'll need to download jquery.

This is a javascript solution, however it's safe to assume that everyone is using a javascript capable browser.

Answer 3

The standard way to do this is to submit the form to a different page (submit.php, for example), which provides a new page with the thankyou message. No javascript, no DHTML.

You could use javascript to replace the innerHTML of a huge div containing everything, or remove all the elements, but I'd advise against it.

Answer 4

There's 2 options:

1. Old school forms: Person clicks submit and form data gets sent server side via GET or POST, the page loads again and displays "Thanks for submitting"

2. New school javascript AJAX Person clicks submit and javascript submits form data to server side via AJAX and removes the form elements to then add "Thanks for submitting"

Anything else is some hybrid of both these techniques.