Javascript (and maybe PHP) form/email submit problem

JavaScript
1

I have a page that was used a php include to pull this code into a sidebar div:


<html>

    <head>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        function submitform()
{
    document.forms["question_form"].submit();
}
        </script>

    </head>
        <body>
   <div style="padding:25px 35px 35px 35px;">
   <p class="bb center"><strong>Texty text stuff</strong></p>
  </div>

  <div id="question_form">

   <form id="question_form" method="post" action="sendmail.php" target="_self" onSubmit="return checkemail(this)">
  <p>
   <label for="name">Your name:</label> <br /> <input type="text" id="name" value="" /><br />
   <label for="email">E-mail address:</label> <br /> <input type="text" id="email" value="" /><br />
   <label for="phone">Phone</label> <br /> <input type="text" id="phone" value="" /><br />
   <label for="question">Questions or Comments</label>
   <textarea NAME="comment" id="question"ROWS=150 COLS=150> </textarea>
   </p>
   <div><a href="javascript: submitform()" class="box_ro3">SUBMIT</a></div>
  </form>
 </div>
</body>
</html>

it passed the form data onto my sendmail.php script and it works. I get the email with all the form info included.

Then the client decided they wanted a more involved form, so I re-coded it and plugged the form code into a main content div, and put some text and a mailto: link in the sidebar where the old form code reside.

At this point, when I click on the “submit” button, the javascript doesn’t send the form data over to the sendmail script. But, if I drop the old form code back into the sidebar, it does. After much testing of cut/pasting of validation code and other factors, I narrowed it down to this factor: the old form code needs to be in the sidebar. (code trimmed of extraneous stuff)

New contact page:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
   
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/layout.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/form.css" type="text/css" />


<script type="text/javascript">
        function submitform()
{
    document.forms["question_form"].submit();
}
        </script>
</head>

<body>
<div id="wrapper">
    <div id="header">
             <h1 class="ital">Page Title</h1>
    </div>

   <div id="shell">
        <h3>Contact us:</h3>
        <p>For more information ... blah blah blah... fill out the form below.</p>
       <!--snipped: misc html info and a google maps embed-->
</div><!--shell close-->
    
<div id="formbox">
        <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
        <form id="question_form" method="post" action="sendmail.php" target="_self" onSubmit="return checkEmail(this)">

            <tr><td align="left" width="200" colspan="3">
                    <label class="desc top" >Full name: </label>
                    <input name="name" class="element text med" type="text" maxlength="75" size="180" tabindex=1 />
            </td>
<!--snipped: big hunk of form code that's not relevant...-->

</tr>

            <tr><td align="right" colspan="5">
                    <a href="javascript: submitform()" class="box_ro1">SUBMIT</a>

                </td></tr>
        </form>
        </table>
</div> <!-- formbox closed -->
        
   
    
<div id="nav">
  <?php
  include("nav_main.php")
  ?>
 </div>

 <div id="login">
    <?php
    include ("login.php");
    ?>
 </div>

 <div id="right">
   <?php 
   include ("sidebar.php"); <!-- this is where the old form code resided-->
   ?>
 </div>

<?php
function check_input($data, $problem='')
{
    $data = trim($data);
    $data = stripslashes($data);
    $data = htmlspecialchars($data);
    if ($problem && strlen($data) == 0)
    {
        die($problem);
    }
    return $data;
}
?>


</div> <!--wrapper close-->
</body>
</html>

As you can probably tell from my clunky code, I’m not adept at either javascript of php - I’m learning as I go.

2

The form tags must be outside the table.

Why you JavaScript to submit the form? The button or input will do this without using JavaScript.