help with web tool

[William J Poser]

Shannon,

Basically, the way you set something like this up is that you
create a web page that includes FORM tags for the user's input.
One attribute of the FORM tag says what to do when the user submits
input, which will be to run your software. Your software will do the
parsing etc. and then generate a new web page containing the result.

For example, here is the portion of the Northwest Journal of Linguistics'
web page that allows people to subscribe:

<FORM action="http://cgi.sfu.ca/~nwjlsa/cgi-bin/register.cgi" method="GET">
<input type="text" name="email_address" size="30" maxlength="255" value="">
<input type="submit" value="Register">
</FORM>

It creates an entry space in which people can type their email address
and a button labelled "Register". The "action" attribute tells it what
to do when the button is pressed, namely run the named script.
In this case, "register.cgi" is a Perl script that adds the email address
to an address list and then generates a new web page that says thanks for
registering.

The hard part with this is often getting the right files into the
right places, which normally requires the cooperation of your system
administrator. For example, in the case of NWJL, the machine on which
the main NWJL site is located does not allow the execution of CGI
scripts, so the script is actually located on a different machine.

Bill