Thanks for the quick response, we are using activestate perl and pages are being output via xml in different locations in this webapp that is the site..xmlwriter outputs some of it, it uses xslt transforms but I am not well versed in that either so not sure how to pass a query string in one of those (I know its supposed to be possible but I don't understand it well enough to want to attempt it) data stored in sql for each site etc, the helpfiles themselves are populated into an iframe they are just html, could this be done without using cgi? This section I am working on goes from our webapplication to our help website its passing authentication from the webapp as well as where in our application they are,my goal is to make the help "context" sensitive based on what is returned in that string and make it appear on the page. your assumptions are correct in regards to the topic. time is an issue here as well, they want this working right away, which of course doesn't help my learning curve much .. many thanks for the sample, I will work on today and write back if I am still stupid tomorrow..I probly will be..lol..