I was looking into best form practices and I stumbled upon this PDF slide show which has a lot of information and examples of existing web-forms. It goes on to describe styling issues from content grouping to placement of labels and excessive visual noise. Why one thing might be better than another given the circumstances and application of the form. Also, it’s mostly pictures of forms with some bulleted slides here and there.
I don’t know why he is an authority or what his credentials are, but some of his opinions make sense to me.
Luke Wroblewski will be giving the lecture/workshop on web form design at uPenn at the web symposium in mid-July.
Smashing Magazine produces a good article on this a few weeks back.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/04/17/web-form-design-modern-solutions-and-creative-ideas/
Nice find by the way. I think forms online are something essential to a website yet it is also something that is constantly butchered.