Climbing the CGI Learning Curve
Okay, it’s time to get into concrete programming details. This section introduces CGI coding one step at a time -- from simple, noninteractive scripts to larger programs that utilize all the common web page user input devices (what we called “widgets” in the Tkinter GUI chapters of Part II). We’ll move slowly at first, to learn all the basics; the next two chapters will use the ideas presented here to build up larger and more realistic web site examples. For now, let’s work though a simple CGI tutorial, with just enough HTML thrown in to write basic server-side scripts.
A First Web Page
As
mentioned, CGI scripts are intimately bound up with HTML, so
let’s start with a simple HTML page. The file
test0.html, shown in Example 12-1, defines a bona fide, fully functional web
page -- a text file containing HTML code, which specifies the
structure and contents of a simple web page.
Example 12-1. PP2E\Internet\Cgi-Web\Basics\test0.html
<HTML><BODY> <TITLE>HTML 101</TITLE> <H1>A First HTML page</H1> <P>Hello, HTML World!</P> </BODY></HTML>
If you point your favorite web browser to the Internet address of this file (or to its local path on your own machine), you should see a page like that shown in Figure 12-2. This figure shows the Internet Explorer browser at work; other browsers render the page similarly.
Figure 12-2. A simple web page from an HTML file
To ...
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