a
computer programming language for adding dynamic capabilities to
World Wide Web pages. Web pages marked up with
HTML (hypertext markup language) or
XML (extensible markup language) are largely static documents. Web scripting can add information to a page as a reader uses it or let the reader enter information that may, for example, be passed on to the order department of an online business. CGI (common gateway interface) provides one mechanism; it transmits requests and responses between the reader's Web browser and the Web server that provides the page. The CGI component on the server contains small programs called scripts that take information from the browser system or provide it for display. A simple script might ask the reader's name, determine the
Internet address of the system that the reader uses, and print a greeting. Scripts may be written in any programming language, but, because they are generally simple text-processing routines, computer scripting languages (
computer scripting language) such as PERL are particularly appropriate.
Another approach is to use a language designed for Web scripts to be executed by the browser. JavaScript is one such language, designed by the
Netscape Communications Corp.; it may be used with both Netscape's and
Microsoft Corporation's browsers. JavaScript is a simple language, quite different from Java. A JavaScript program may be embedded in a Web page with the HTML tag