Professional JavaScript For Web Developers

Chapter 11
You may be wondering why you can’t just use a Submit button and disable it using
onclick. The answer is that the button actually disables before the form is submitted,
which then prevents the form from being submitted at all.
Resetting forms
If you want to provide the user a way to reset all form fields to their default values, you can use an
HTML Reset button:
Similar to a Submit button, a Reset button requires no scripting for the browser to know what to do
when it is clicked. Also similar to the Submit button, a reset event fires when the button is clicked:
Of course, you can also use the onreset event handler to cancel the form reset.
The form does have a reset() method that can reset the form directly from script without using a Reset
button:
Unlike submit(), using reset() still fires the reset event and the onreset event handler is still
executed.
Resetting a form has fallen out of favor among Web developers because an increasing
number of users have mistakenly reset the form instead of submitting it (often
the Submit and Reset buttons are next to each other). If a form contains information
in form fields when it is first loaded, a Reset button can be helpful because it resets
the fields to their initial values. For forms that initially load without any information
in form fields, it is recommended to avoid using a Reset button.
Text boxes
Two flavors of text boxes are used in HTML: a single-line version, , and a
multiline version, .
The element must have its type attribute set to “text” in order to display a text box. You
then use the size attribute to specify how wide the text box should be in terms of visible characters (for
instance, setting size to “10” means that only 10 characters are visible at one time). The value attribute
specifies the initial value of the text box and the maxlength attribute specifies how many characters are
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