Thanks for your reply almut.
I think I'm the one that's missed something as I'm completely new to Perl and a bit lost!
So I do all of the processing server-side?
Can you give me a quick example of how I might, for example, read in a name that someone's entered on the clint side and then check that name against a default name on the server side?
I find Perl's syntax very fiddly and all of my attempts to do it so far have resulted in errors and infinite loops galore.
Thanks so much for your help.