How to make a greyed-out HTML form?

Question

I'd like to have a group of HTML text <input>'s that can be all greyed-out (disabled) at the same time. I also want the entire area they are in to somehow be greyed-out or at least visibly disabled. I've seen things like this done in desktop applications.

Any ideas on an easy/elegant way to do it? I'm trying to avoid manually setting each to disabled="disabled", and also have an area surrounding the <input>'s that indicates that entire portion of the form is non-editable.

EDIT: Sorry, I should mention a few more things...

1. Everything is local. I'm not using PHP or ASP or anything like that... just HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Also no jquery!
2. I want to enable/disable the "area" dynamically with JavaScript
3. It's NOT a <form>, just a bunch of <input>'s

Answer 1

please notice: if you do disabled>

the input-element won't be transmitted if the user submits the form.

what you want to do instead is:

<input type="text" name="surname" value="Korpela" readonly>

if your form is inside a

<div style="background-color; grey;">

Does that cut the cake?

https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/readonly.html