why does a html </form> tag always make a <br>???

j0sh

hello.

ever when i insert a </form> tag into my documents there is a space after it as if there was a <br> tag. i think you know what i mean.
why is this and isn't there a possibility to avoid this?? it's quite bad for the design of my pages sometimes...

thx for answer. gr33tz

j0sh

scialom

It never happened to me...
Can you post your code and I will see if something worng?

Assaf

superwormy

I have this problem sometimes as well, to the best of my knowledge, no, there is no way around it.

It's just how the browser interprets your HTML, and that's that.

As a note, Opera and some other browsers don't do this, its mostly IE and Netscape.

One way you MIGHT be able to get around this is by just not closing your form tag, just don't put that ending </form> tag in at all. And if you do one of these:

Then it's still valid X/HTML as well. Just be careful if you have multiple forms on one page with these, it can botch things up if you dont' close your forms then.

bad76

Hi,
any other way it's with css:

may be this work too...

elToro

Then it's still valid X/HTML as well.

Actually, it isn't. It's well-formed, but it isn't valid. FORM isn't an empty element.

Also, elements such as INPUT, SELECT, and TEXTAREA are valid only when contained inside a FORM element (which they wouldn't be if the opening and closing tags for the FORM were combined).

That said, I think bad76 is on the right track. Try using CSS to effect its appearance. display: inline; might be what you're looking for. margin: 0; would keep space from being added below the form, but it wouldn't prevent a line from wrapping at the end of the form.

superwormy

OK, let me refrase what I said then... heres a page I've made previously which solves exactly this problem by using exactly the method I've shown.

http://www.keywordscentral.com/keyword_keywordmarketingandresearch.htm?squishit=1

Now, go run it through the w3c validator:
http://validator.w3.org/

Or the WDG validator:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/

BOTH of those validators report that as VALID X/HTML TRANSITIONAL. That's good enough for me :-)

elToro

Ok, I'll rephrase what I said too. Form control elements (INPUT, SELECT, etc.) may appear outside of a FORM element and the markup will still validate. It will not (or rather should not, depending on the user agent) achieve the desired effect. Specifically, those controls would not be part of that form, and should not submit correctly.

Here's an excerpt from the spec:

A successful control is "valid" for submission. ...A successful control must be defined within a FORM element....

It may work, but I would caution against using this method. XHTML-aware browsers should recognize that the controls are outside of that form and really shouldn't even know what to do with the submit button, because it isn't associated with the FORM element where the ACTION is set. Non-XHTML-aware browsers, not recognizing the abbreviated closing tag, would just think that the FORM element never closes and would essentially assume that the rest of the document is all part of the form (thus it would work).

superwormy

Just for the record, although it really SHOULDN'T work according to the spec... IE, Netscape, Opera, Mozilla ALL work with my method.

Nevertheless... if the CSS method works, I'd go that route anyway, I just didn't know about that method until today :-)

As another note, you could also use Javascript to tell the form elements that are outside of a form which form they should act upon. Not the best method, nor the cleanest and most browser friendly... but that should work as well.

feldon23

It's very frustrating. The solution is to do your </form> tag later in the page. It doesn't really matter where you close the form.

steadyguy

The reason form tags have an open line after them is because they are block level elements. All block level elements do this. <p> tags, for example, or any of the header tags (<h1>,<h2>, <h3> ...).

If you really want to get rid of this space (or add it, for that matter), you can do it with a single line of CSS:

form {display: inline;}

To add the space to your <img ..> or <strong> tags (or other normally inline elements), use this CSS rule:

img {display: block;}

The advantage to doing it this way as opposed to the {margin:0;} rule above is that this rule will allow you to wrap text around the form (ie., try adding 'float: left; clear:none;' to the rule, and add a bunch of text afterward.)

Damien_B

Originally posted by bad76
<style>
<--
form { margin:0; }
-->
</style>

Yes, that is the best way to do it. Use CSS to eliminate the margins. It is also handy for blockquote and other tags that behave the same way as well.

Steadyguy, I have never heard of those attributes before. I'll be sure to remember them. Also learnt a new term "block level". I'm happy. 😃

Superwormy, that's a very strange method you use there. I am suprised that it validates and is probably a sign that the validator can't pick up everything. Probably assumes that it's correct because you closed it like an empty tag.

j0sh

wow thx to you all, never thought this small question would get so many answers. 🙂
anyway, with css inline and margin both works.

thx a lot and gr33tz! 🙂

j0sh