What's the point of having hidden input in HTML? What are common uses for this?

Question

I don\'t see the benefit of having hidden input? If you set the value of the hidden input why not just use that value at the point where you reference this hidden input?

Answer 1

Consider a form that's being displayed to edit a record in a database, one technique is to bake the id of that record in a hidden input and have it submitted back so the server can read it back.

It's also used frequently for security purposes (as genesis has said).

Another reason might be for javascript-oriented scenarios, perhaps for non standard controls such as treeviews, where the concept of a selected node cannot be represented as a normal input. Instead, JS can manipulate a hidden field and store the node's name/id in it, so that it can be read by the server.