Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

In CGI programming with perl, is there by chance a way to pop up an alert or message box?
Or is the only way of displaying information by printing to the screen?
I think I already know the answer (no), but maybe I'll get lucky!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Message Boxes?
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 08, 2000 at 02:45 UTC
    You can serve up images, embedded movies, files to download, MP3s, Java applets, and even client-side scripts with CGI. It's just a matter of *what* you print to STDOUT (which is sent to the browser).

    The CGI.pm module even supports including JavaScript, as evidenced by the following snippet: 

    print $q->start_html(-title=>'The Riddle of the Sphinx',
    -script=>{-language=>'JAVASCRIPT',
    -src=>'/javascript/sphinx.js'}
);

    [download]
    I would imagine that something such as: 
    <script>
window.alert("Your Message Here");
</script>

    [download]
    would suffice.
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      Keep in mind that most people find the javascript alert box (you know, the one that will not go away until you click the button) extremely annoying. The only time it is barely tolerable (IMO) is when it is used to issue an alert as somebody tries to submit a form. For example, you could have a page that asks for a date and have javascript parse the answer and show an alert if the date was in the wrong format: this saves wear and tear on the cgi script that is going to actually do something wonderful with that date. (of course, it should check the format too, but a little client-side double checking can be nice)

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