Laravel best way to form an HTML form and token - html

Question

Hi I am working with Laravel and I have a question about the . Back in time we used to write something like the following when we want to submit data.
<form action="insert.php" method="POST"> </form>
Now, I have seen in Youtube videos and here in stackoverflow many code snips where we use the following:
<form action="{{URL::to('/insert')}}" method="POST">
I would like to know what is the difference? In the second way /insert is pointing to a file or a controller? The first one is wrong? Or it is just an alternative old fashion way?
Also I have seen two ways of inserting token. Which is the best? What are the differences? Both work the same? What will happen if I do not insert a token?
{{csrf_field()}}
#csrf
Thank you for your time!

Answer 1

Well, when you do this:
<form action="insert.php" method="POST"> </form>
What you are doing is telling the html markup explicitly the relative path to post the data, in your case index.php
Say, you were on this url in your app: http://myapp.com/some-page and you were click the submit button, what will happen is that it will post the data to this relative url: http://myapp.com/some-page/index.php
Now, the reason why we use the URL helper facade is to make urls relative to the application's url.
For example, if you've defined in your application config (or .env) that the APP_URL is equal to something like http://myapp.com then when you use this: URL::to('/insert') it will output the following url: http://myapp.com/insert - regardless of which url you are on.
Hope this makes sense. As for this:
{{csrf_field()}}
#csrf
I believe they achieve the same, they generate an hidden input field with your current csrf token in it.