suPerlative: CGI and Other Scripts

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts are used to process our forms, such as the comments form. Using forms instead of straight mailto links helps reduce spam, and prompts users to enter the appropriate information.

• Our email button (at the bottom of this page) actually goes to our FAQ and the comments form is linked from the bottom of that; not the nicest of ways to allow our users to contact us, and I really wish it wasn't necessary, but when we use mailto links we get a lot of email asking questions that are answered in the site. Here is the Perl script for it.

• Menu.cgi CGI program to manage navigation (form) buttons. This is such a sweet trivial program thanks to sensible directory naming.. otherwise, it would need a look-up-table to translate button labels to directory names.

• cgi-lib.pl The cgi-lib.pl library has become the de facto standard library for creating Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts in the Perl language. The cgi-lib.pl library makes CGI scripting in Perl easy enough for anyone to process forms and create dynamic Web content.

• pretty Reformat HTML to be more readable. Rather crude, but better than nothing..

• The Glossary is generated by index.pl. This program generates HTML files from a flat file. The input file contains a little more structure, grouping entries by letter of the alphabet. The program also allows easy cross-referencing between entries; if any word in the entry's definition is contained in square brackets, a link to the defining term is generated.

  A
      Action              /Authoring/HTML/Forms/form.html
  #       action.gif      34,35
          A [form] [attribute] that specifies the
          [CGI] program to process the form data.
          It specifies the action [URL] for the form.
          This URL will almost always point to a [CGI]
  	script to decode the form results; but it could,
  	for example, be a [mailto].
  
      ActiveX     /Software/Tools/ActiveX.html
          A [Java]-like Microsoft language that permits
  	web-originated programs to be run from the
  	Microsoft Internt Explorer [browser].
  

• vlinks.pl checks for broken links. This program is another fine example of the brevity that can be achieved using Perl and the supplied libraries. It's only a few lines of code. It takes a list of input files (e.g. created using the UNIX 'find' utility), parses each of those files, and creates a list of links, which it then checks. It generates a 'broken.html' file with those links which we then check manually.

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