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 and programming languages 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 visitor. 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 Mac-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. These scripts are often used for handling forms and for searching and updating databases, but there are of course many other uses for CGIs. You will need to set up your own server or contact your Web server provider about the possibilities to use scripts on the server.
More information and a list of resources on the Web that contains server side scripts and CGIs are available at
SpinnerWorld.com: Server Side Scripts PageServer Side Includes, SSI
On many web servers there is support for a mechanism called Server Side Includes, SSI. Files saved with a name ending with ".shtml" are 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.
If your server supports SSI, you can use the Server Side Includes menu in PageSpinner's Tag menu to insert SSI commands in your page.