| The Campus Beat |
WWW Everyone
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Putting information out on the World Wide Web is great, but what if you
want to ask questions to get specific information back from your visitors?
That's what HTML forms are for, and they aren't much harder to produce than
simple HTML. But you'll need a program to receive the submitted forms and email
them on to you. The programs that do this are called CGI scripts (Common Gateway
Interface); they're simply a way to get a Web server to run a program rather
than just fetching a file.
Do you want to ask people specific questions and to receive their answers
by email, or do you want to let people search your myriad pages for specific
words? You are now in luck! FormMail and SearchUIC will let you do exactly
that, with features you might not have known you needed. And you won't
even need to write any programs; the FormMail and SearchUIC CGI scripts
are publicly available on both tigger and icarus; just direct the output
of your HTML form to these scripts, and let the Web server do the rest.
FormMail and SearchUIC
are two of a growing list of advanced Web tools available at UIC. The list and
how-to instructions using for each tool -- including FormMail and SearchUIC
-- can be found on the Web (of course!), at: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/home/NETWORK.html#SERV-WEB
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