Frequently Asked Questions - CGI

• What is CGI?
• Does my Elite Host account come standard with CGI capabilities?

What is CGI?

HTML documents are plain text files that live on a computer connected to the Internet, ready to be viewed. A Web server waits for and sends out those files in response to requests from Web browsers. There is nothing dynamic or interactive about these documents--they are "flat" files. If you want your site to do something dynamic or interactive, like handling information in an HTML form, you have to run a separate program outside your Web server. That's where CGI comes in--it's the interface between these applications and the Web server.

These external programs can do just about anything: handle incoming forms, grab records from a database, save data to a file, and so on. As long as you conform to the CGI specification, you have a wide choice of tools for writing your CGI applications. Typically, you use Perl (practical extraction and report language), although you can write CGI applications in just about any programming language, including Java and C/C++.

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Does my Elite Host account come standard with CGI capabilities?

Each Elite Host account comes standard with certain CGI capabilities.

All of our accounts come standard with a Form Feedback script, which allows your to create an interactive form that mails back your form responses! We use Formmail, a hightly customizable CGI form posting utility. Learn more about using Formmail now!

More CGI scripts are being added each month. We will be sure to let you know as they become available.

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