The Jedi Master Speaks is a Dream Machine Site The Dream Machine --- The Imagination of the World Wide Web

The Jedi Master Speaks

One of the simplest tools is the "mailto." This HTML tag, similar to the hyperlink that takes you to another page, brings up an email form which is pre-addressed to you, making it simple for your visitors to pass feedback about your site back to you. A disadvantage of this method is that it publishes your email address, which can be "harvested" by "spiders," computer programs that traverse the World Wide Web, reading the source code of each HTML page encountered, looking for email addresses (which, of course, are distinguishable by the presence of the "@" symbol somewhere in the string defining it. One could argue, and this author has in other places, that the presence of a mailto solicits email from one and all, whether or not they have actually personally visited your site. Still, mailto's are important tools and nearly every page of the Dream Machine cluster of sites contains one, including this very page.

A second type of interactive HTML page is the "form." A form is just what it sounds like, a place where you can enter various data in little windows pre-programmed to different types. Once finished and submitted, the data are subjected to checks to see that all required data have been entered, that the right type of data has been entered for each entry, etc. Then, if the whole form passes this test, it is sent on to a server based software program...usually a CGI...which processes it. One such CGI, called "FormMail" takes the information from the form and emails it to you to do with as you wish. The Web Poetry Corner utilizes FormMail for the input of poems. Other types of CGI might use the form data to update a database, to generate an HTML page, or anything else you might wish to do with it.

A third form of interactive Web device is the bulletin board or "discussion forum." This tool also requires a more complicated program (a CGI), which is called instead of an HTML page by a hyperlink. In a bulletin board, visitors can post their very own comments or post follow-ups to other people's comments. Again, this site contains such a tool. If you want to construct one for your site, you can visit Matt Wright's Script Archive, where this and many other CGI scripts (written in the PERL computer language and including the "FormMail" program mentioned above.) can be found.

An even more advanced tool is the Chat Room. This software allows many users to simultaneously type comments to one another, including you, if you so choose. Unlike the previous two methods of interactivity, this one produces no permanent record of what was said. It is also very bandwidth and processor intensive, since the software must keep connections open to all participants simultaneously. However, it has the advantage of being "real time." That is, your comments appear to all others in the Chat Room at approximately the same time you enter them. In the future, when enough people have large "pipes" (i.e. wide bandwidth) to the Internet, this type of interaction among users of a site will expand to include audio and video.

Since the Internet is still a "work in progress," it is a certainty that many other types of interactivity will be devised for it.

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