February 1997
Extending Your Site with Scripts
Scripting ActiveX Contorls with VBScript
By Gary Cornell
With version 2, VBScript is finally showing off the features expected in a serious scripting tool. Gary previews the latest language features, while Erin Carroll shares her interactive scheduling calendar in VBScript.
Client-Side Javascript
By Emily A. Vander Veer
As Emily puts it, the only way to add intelligence to your Web pages prior to JavaScript was to "gather up the client data and fling it at a CGI program." Here, Emily shows how to use HTML objects such as forms, buttons, and input fields to perform tasks like field validation on the client rather than the server.
Managing Browser Differences
By Mark Baker
While CGI allows you to communicate with virtually any back-end program, Navigator and Internet Explorer treat CGI material differently in a number of significant ways. Mark shows how you can create CGI applications that work with both popular browsers.
A Perl Library for Writing CGI Scripts
By Lincoln D. Stein
CGI.pm hides the low-level details of creating HTTP headers, parsing query strings, and maintaining state, making it a library no Perl developer should program without. The best news is that it's free.
C O L U M N S :
Webmaster's Domain
Introduced by Netscape as means of coping with HTTP's stateless protocol, cookies present strong benefits as well as the potential for abuse. Lincoln D. Stein looks behind the controversy and shows how you can use cookies on your site.
Doing Justice to the Web
To determine the extent to which other people's creative works can be used, reused, manipulated, distorted, and changed online, Catherine Sansum Kirkman looks to case law surrounding unauthorized sound sampling in the music industry.
HTML Coding
There are several methods to create animations for your Web pages, and there are just as many tradeoffs. Laura Lemay compares the differences and shows how to work with GIF, Java, and Shockwave animations in HTML.
Virtual Worlds
VRML provides directional lights, point lights, and spotlights to simulate the different kinds of light that exist in the real world. Andrea L. Ames shows you how to incorporate light into your home space.
Programming with Perl
An anonymous proxy can strip all hints of a request's origin, so that the Web server being contacted knows only that the original request came from an anonymous proxy host. Randal L. Schwartz rolls his own proxy server using a new feature in the LWP.
Java Alley
This month, Bruce Eckel looks at how run-time type information (RTTI) can be used to discover information about objects and classes.
D E P A R T M E N T S :
Lab Notes
Corel's Web.Designer is a collection of three programs: a WYSIWYG design environment, a specialized version of HTML Transit, and a collection of more than 8000 images. Foster D. Coburn III puts all three on the test bench.
Insite
Running more than 75 virtual Web servers for both internal intranet and external Internet access, Miller Freeman's Jay Schaefer epitomizes today's Webmaster. Peter Varhol talks with Jay, Webmaster to Webmaster.
News & Notes
On the Server Side; Push Me Pull You.
The Home Page
Editor-in-Chief Michael Floyd talks about "The way the cookie crumbles."
The Last Page
Michael Swaine talks about "Personal Intranets for the Truly Self-absorbed."
