in reply to multiple form interaction in cgi
First of all, I have two (three...) very important things to say to you:
After you have visited http://search.cpan.org and spent a day or so getting your eyes opened by an introduction to these three modules, we can consider the ways that you can accomplish your task.
If you use a regular CGI-application, then each time you submit a form, the server must send back the HTML for the new page to be displayed, and you incorporate the previously POSTed information into that.
If, on the other hand, you use AJAX, you can update what the user sees ... by executing JavaScript code right there on the user's machine, without bothering the web server at all.
Lest your eyes glaze-over at the thought of AJAX, any more than it might already be doing at the thought of using CGI without the tools I have just mentioned, know this ... “the tools that I have just mentioned” provide a very sophisticated and robust level of support for AJAX with a minimum of coding-effort on your part. In the Perl environment, thanks to CPAN, nearly everything that you might wish to do (except, of course, for what you wish to do... ;-) ...) has been advanced to a very, very high degree of sophistication. (On the JavaScript side, the Prototype JavaScript-library provides you “all the goodies of Ruby on Rails without the gemstones and locomotives.”) Instead of writing it, you just use it. Woot! Woot!