Form Usage Question

Why is it used this way?

[bumpaw]

I was looking at the source for a site and found another hole in my knowledge and am sure someone here can fill it in. I saw:

<form name="Form1" method="post" action="agents.html" id="Form1">
<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" value="dDwt...etc" />

After this came a table based layout that looked normal with no other references to anything to do with <form> except </form>. The whole page was contained between these form tags, but the page when displayed in the browser appeared to have nothing to do with forms. Can someone shed a little light on this for me?

[edited by: tedster at 10:01 pm (utc) on Sep. 28, 2004]
[edit reason] fix side scroll [/edit]

[encyclo]

I think

value="dDwt"

is something to do with a .NET application. From there I'd hasard a guess that it could be some sort of control which allows the page to be edited via a web interface (like a CMS).

I could be completely wrong, though. Was there no submit button or equivalent Javascript link anywhere?

[Birdman]

I've seen it before on sites created with wysiwig html editors. Most likely a bug.

[bumpaw]

Was there no submit button or equivalent Javascript link anywhere?

No submit buttons or inputs visible on all six pages. It is for a Realtor and he has one page with MLS user search service provided by a outside vendor.

I've seen it before on sites created with wysiwig html editors. Most likely a bug.

They do maintain the site with Front Page.

[bumpaw]

I think value="dDwt" is something to do with a .NET application.

It's been a while but some clues were found tonight. I got curious and did a search on "_VIEWSTATE" and got:

The all mighty "ViewState"
There are many ways you can preserve the state of a web page - luckily much of the work is done behind the scenes. All web controls and html control (we are to discuss in the coming chapters) can maintain their state (associated values, like items of the ListBox) between round-trips (page postbacks) without any coding effort on your part. This is called the view state.
When you run your application, after the page is displayed in the web browser, select View - Source to see the "raw" HTML. You should locate the _viewstate hidden form field. This hidden field is auto-generated by asp.net for every .aspx web page. (From an article on asp.net at about.com)

When I got these files there were on an Apache server, but must have been at one time on a Microsoft set up.