in reply to CGI / HTML problem

What I've always done in the past is use javascript to display a div tag (which I hide on page load) after hitting the submit button. Something like this:
<div id="waitBox" style="background-color: #d6e7fe; font-family:Arial, +Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold;color: #000000;text-align: left; position:absolute; +border: thin solid #1A448E; padding: 5px; display: none; z-index: 3000; width:250px; height:75px;"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> function showWait(status){ var object=document.getElementById('waitBox'); if(status){ object.style.left = (document.body.clientWidth - 250) +/ 2; object.style.top = document.body.scrollTop + (document +.body.clientHeight - 75) / 2; object.style.display = "block"; object.innerHTML='<br><center>Please wait while your s +earch is being performed...</center>'; }else{object.style.display = "none";} } </script> <form action="script.pl" method="post" name="form1"> <input type="button" onclick="showWait(1);this.form.submit();" value=" +Search"> </form>

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Re^2: CGI and/or HTML problem
by mike_gerard (Novice) on Dec 23, 2008 at 22:22 UTC
    Although I have not yet understood this (it is late at night here!) I read it as offering the user a button, which appears somewhere when the submit (done from a separate frame) is clicked. Not exactly what I had in mind, but maybe it can be adopted. Really, I would like to keep the user updated as to what the main script is doing (and can take a variable amount of time which I cannot estimate in advance). I would have preferred to stay purely in Perl, not having much Javascript knowledge.