《Bonus Chapter E》.pdf

Bonus Chapter E Internet Programming 2: CGI In the last chapter we saw how to set up HTML pages containing information that could be viewed both locally and across networks. While this is a very good way of publishing information, it is all essentially static information. To supply dynamic information, we need to allow the user, through the Web page, to interact with programs on the server in a dynamic way. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to allow the viewer to send information back to the server and how the server can pass this information to programs, which can then respond to the client in a dynamic way. We are going to look only at server-side processing, that is, where code executes away from the client. We are also going to concentrate on stand-alone server-side programs, rather than scripts embedded in Web pages, such as those used by PHP. It is also possible to write client-side programs, usually referred to as Dynamic HTML (DHTML), where scripts execute on the client, a topic we are not going to pursue here. The interface specification that defines how information can be passed from browsers back to the server is called the Common Gateway Interface, usually abbreviated to CGI. The program accepting such information from a browser, commonly referred to as a CGI program, can process this information and use the HTTP protocol to send commands or dynamic documents back to the browser. Before we can look at the CGI, we need to look at an HTML construct we haven’t yet encountered: the FORM element. FORM Elements In the HTML that we’ve seen so far, all the tags have been concerned with controlling the way information is structured for display to the client, but they haven’t provided for any input from the browser, other than the selection of hypertext links. We can set up fields that allow user input using the FORM tag. This is a composite tag. It can contain severa