First, let me answer the question "Why do it at all ?". Here's 2 main reasons:

• Search engines are filled with banners, pictures and unnecessary options that slow down the navigation. By customizing their forms I can have all searches at the palm of my head, without the overhead.

• Things like webmail accounts and member areas are very useful, only problem is remembering all these usernames and typing them everytime. By hardcoding these into the form I can have access to my areas with one click (obviously, this is not the kind of form I'd put online :)

So, onward to form hacking!

The whole process is actually pretty simple once you get the hang of it. The HTML code may look scary at first, but most of the stuff there is formatting options - once you clear it, form itself is pretty small and self-explanatory. Now, if you're lucky enough to have KEDIT text editor you can use my FORMA macro to clear the code, so only form-related lines are left. If not, you can still read the source code and write something similar in your language of choice.

Basically, when clearing the code, you want to delete all lines except those containing 'form', 'select', 'input', 'textarea' and 'option'. Once done, you will see which variables form consists of.

Next step is simplifying the form - replace input areas and selection boxes with hardcoded values by changing field type to 'hidden' and assigning to it the default value you need. This is mostly straighforward, except for the type 'checkbox', where you will want to replace 'checked' with 'value=on'.

The only thing left is to change the ACTION header in the <form line - it usually points to something like /scripts/run.cgi - you will want to put the full original website address before '/', so form will be able to find the script.

You can stop at my all-in-one Finder page at http://daugava.com/iskatel.htm - it has a bunch of customized forms, as well as links to original sites - so you can see what changes I made to get forms to do what I want.

That's it - have fun with the forms!

Andrew