Problem with HTML form submit

Question

Can anyone tell me why this form does not properly submit values to server?

 <form method="post" action="http://www.***.com/index.php/session/authenticate" class="form login" id="login_form"> 
 <div class="group wat-cf"> 
 <div class="left"> 
 <label class="label right">Login</label> 
 </div> 
 <div class="right"> 
 <input type="text" class="text_field" id="username"/> 
 </div> 
 </div> 
 <div class="group wat-cf"> 
 <div class="left"> 
 <label class="label right">Password</label> 
 </div> 
 <div class="right"> 
 <input type="password" class="text_field" id="password"/> 
 </div> 
 </div> 
 <div class="group navform wat-cf"> 
 <div class="right"> 
 <button class="button" type="submit"> 
 <img src="images/icons/key.png" alt="Save" /> Login
 </button> 
 </div> 
 </div> 
 </form> 

On the server side I echo out the $_POST superglobal which is empty, and I can see my request headers which are sent when the form is submitted:

Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Charset:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Cache-Control:max-age=0
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:0
Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cookie:ci_session=***session_id=***user_agent%22%3Bs%3A50%3A%22Mozilla%2F5.0+%28Macintosh%3B+Intel+Mac+OS+X+10_6_7%29+App%22%3Bs%3A13%3A%22last_activity%22%3Bi%3A1307578661%3B%7D31ee24db2875550081268dc7df883f76; ci_csrf_token=***
Host:www.***.com
Origin:http://**.com
Referer:http://***.com/index.php/session/login
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_7) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/*** Safari/534.30

• Pekka: Does the HTML validate? Could there be two nested forms?
• user557846: sure about that action url ??
• Colum: Do you var_dump $_POST or $_POST['']? Because that looks correct. Also, you should use var_dump or print_r as the $_POST is an array
• Casey Flynn: I'm just commenting out the action url for security purposes, the actual form has the proper action url which is confirmed by the output from my php script on the server
• user557846: insecure to give us the url of a site on the internet, there must be a lot of insure sits out there then :-)

Answer 1

You forgot to give the name for the input type, like this

<input type="text" class="text_field" name="username" id="username"/> 
<input type="password" class="text_field" name="password" id="password"/> 

• Casey Flynn: I thought using 'name' was deprecated in favor of 'id'?
• Colum: No, they are both used. Name is for the server (the actual name of the field), id is used for CSS. The ID is not sent to the server
• Abel Mohler: name is not deprecated for form elements.
• Kevin Ji: name is only deprecated for most elements outside of form elements, and on form itself. It is not deprecated for input elements and the like.

Answer 2

You input tags have no name attribute. I think you are using id's instead of name's

For instance

<input type="text" class="text_field" id="username"/>

should be

<input type="text" class="text_field" id="username" name="username" />

or simply

<input type="text" class="text_field" name="username"/>

if you are not using the id's for anything else.

Answer 3

It's the name attribute of input elements that's submitted on the form. Use name='username', etc.