 <p>By submitting the form in HTML you basically tell the browser to generate a normal HTTP request, usually POST or GET, for an URL defined in tag with form fields attached according to the specified method either appended to the URL or included in the request data. </p> <p>There is nothing really special or different from a "normal" HTTP request, in fact you can manually "submit a form" by appending form keys and values to the URL in your browser and navigating to it in case of GET method.</p> <p>Summarizing:</p> <p>1) Yes, you are right.</p> <p>2) From what I've just read (never used REST personally) a REST application is implemented by a servlet mechanism and uses HTTP protocol, so it should be possible to write a REST application for processing HTML forms if the form points to this application's URL.</p>