title: Returning null after form submission
body: <p>As a PHP beginner, I'm stuck with the following problem. I've made an HTML form, like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;form action="mailtest.php" method="post"&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;First_name: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;input  type="text" name="first_name" maxlength="50" size="30"&gt;
  &lt;input type="submit" value="Submit"&gt;
  &lt;/form&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem is that, in the PHP-script ("mailtest.PHP"), <code>isset($_POST['first_name'])</code> always has value FALSE, even if I type in a first name before submitting the form. (And the same is true for all other form fields, which I haven't included in the above code.)</p>
  
  <p>In other words, PHP somehow does not assign the submitted value (or an empty string, as the case my be) to variable <code>$_POST['first_name']</code>, and instead considers that <code>$_POST['first_name']</code> equals null... so something is clearly not connecting here. But what?</p>
  
  <p>In the PHP code, I (for now) simply test whether $_POST['voornaam'] is null, like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if(!isset($_POST['first_name'])) {echo 'yes!';} else {echo 'no!';} 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This always results in 'no!'</p>