Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours

Borrowing Content

You've probably seen Web sites that have somewhat up-to-date stock tickers, news headlines, or sports scores somewhere on the page—even if the person running the site has nothing to do with the original source of the content.

What usually happens is this: A program running on the system you're looking at occasionally goes to the original source of the information and pulls it in. The information is then reformatted and displayed on the target page. Figure 24.1 shows what this process looks like.

Figure 24.1. Fetching a Web page, altering it, and redisplaying it.

Here, you can see that your Web server— by way of its CGI programs—has ...