Ok strictly speaking this isnt totally a Perl problem but I think it is turning into quite an interesting little conundrum that as Perl beginner I haven't seen before...

Here it goes:

My boss tells me he needs a form with X number of fields and stuff. Once the form is filled out, a script (also needs to be done by me) should format it and put little bits of text in between and stuff. It's not too complicated even for a really moronic ignorant beginner such as myself.

I say ok and I do the whole thing in Dreamweaver. However, I am noticing that the longer I go on, the slower Dreamweaver gets. Turns out, the finished MINIMUM product with all of it's drop down menu do-goodery is over 80Kb. So... it also screws up IE with out of memory errors(on a machine running 192Mb of RAM and a PIII 600...). If I split the file then it doesnt screw up IE. Seems like IE doesnt like any HTML file greater than 25Kb.

Most of the data actually consists of the drop down fields. They are meant to represent date and they are repeated a lot throughout the form. As you can imagine, a "date-submitted" drop down menu repeated ten times on a page with each menu having 31 items (for days) will suck up space. Is there anyway I can cut down on that crap to make the HTML file work?

Here is the more interesting question that stems from the form problem... if I split the form, I suppose I can get the users to do each separate part and then somehow merge all of the form entries and generate the report the boss wants.

So Perl monks... what do you do? What do you do?

In reply to An interesting form question by Mork

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