I was using the form on my contact/purchase page for three reasons. First, in conjunction with the third-party products "airtable" and "zapier" I had found out how to send multiple emails containing form data when I hit the submit button. Second, it was useful to be able to use the screen-formatting of fields such as name and address which react nicely when I resize my window on the desktop or when I open the page on my iphone. Third, it was useful to use the validation functionality of the form for fields such as email. I am now abandoning the use of a form for all these things, and am taking alternate approaches. I have determined how to send emails when I hit any button (more on this in a later post) and am currently evaluating how to incorporate data from other basic fields on the page, some of which need to be filled in programmatically. I will have to handle screen formatting without the form, perhaps by using basic non-form fields. I have determined that it is not too hard to validate things like the contents of text boxes as they are being edited and/or upon hitting a button. Worst case I can use html to do all these things. So it will be some more work but I know how to implement all the pieces and just need to put them all together. Thanks everyone who have posted comments above. If anyone still wants to use a form to do these things, the above posts may provide some answers. Good luck. I am now marking this topic answered.
The solution which I have come up with is to integrate with third party products "zapier" and "airtable" to format and send emails to my customers when they submit a form from my squarespace 7.0 website. On my website, my "contact" page now has text fields, radio button fields, and an artwork image, none of which are part of the form. The page also has a single form consisting only of input text fields, an email-field, a name-field, an address-field. and couple text area fields. Half of the form fields I have chosen to completely hide using javascript. When a customer edits one of the non-form fields, I use javascript to place the results in corresponding hidden fields on my form. When my customer hits the submit button, all of the form fields are sent through "Zapier" to "Airtable" to create a new airtable record. When airtable senses that a new record has been created it sends a confirmation email to the customer's email address, and also an email to my website email address. The emails contain all the information from my website contact page, and also display customer-selected artwork images created by referencing images stored on my website. Image URLs are passed to the emails through hidden text fields. The look, feel, and mechanics work great. The last thing I have to do is to create a way to save, access, display, and be able to easily change, the size and price information for artwork masters and prints. There are still some things I am working out to do that for which I have opened a new issue. Thanks for your interest and help.
