Using scripts on the Web server

To extend the capabilities of HTML, which essentially is a language to describe and link textual information with basic support for forms, images and other objects, most web servers can be customized to handle additional scripts that are executed on the server.

Common Gateway Interface, CGI

A widely used standard to execute such scripts are Common Gateway Interface, CGI. A CGI script or CGI application communicates with the server and can create a page on the fly and send it to the server. The server will then transfer the page to the browser.

Unlike using Java, JavaScript or another script language embedded in your Web pages to extend HTML, a well written CGI will usually work regardless of the browser used by the reader. A CGI may be harder to develop, install and customize, though.

CGIs are often written in Perl (a script language popular on many Unix-based servers), AppleScript (on MacOS-based servers) or in C/C++.

Since the scripts are executed on the server, there is no easy way to display any examples when you view pages locally. They are often used for handling forms and for searching in databases, but there are of course many other uses for CGIs. You will need to set up your own server or talk with your Internet provider about the possibilities to use scripts on the server. There are many MacOS-based servers that are very easy to maintain and give enough performance to handle even very busy sites.

Here is a link to Yahoo's list of resources that contains scripts and CGIs:
Computers and Internet:Internet:World Wide Web:CGI - Common Gateway Interface

If you are looking for CGIs for a MacOS-based server you can find a list of these at StarNine, the publisher of the popular MacOS-based server WebStar:
http://www.starnine.com/development/extendingwebstar.html

Many of these CGI's will also work with other MacOS-based Web servers.

Server Side Includes, SSI

In many web servers there is built-in support for a mechanism called Server Side Includes, SSI. Files saved with a name containing the extension ".shtml" are being processed on the server before they are sent to the browser. Special SSI-commands inside HTML comments are used to instruct the server to insert information into the page, similar to PageSpinner's Include files.

Here is a link to SSI information available for the popular Unix-based Apache web server:
http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_include.html