How it all works?

[sphinx3212000]

Im still not clear on what exactly the CGI protocol and server software contribute when a browser requests and sends form data to some application program on a server to be processed. What 'extra stuff' goes on?.....conceptually, i'm just seeing data going to a server which finds the application program (from the url of the ACTION attribute) to process it.

Is special server software required because the server prepares the data in a certain way before it passes it to the application and then protocols are required to get the output from the application to the server and back to the client?

What would happen if i had a .exe C program that i tried to use as the application(as designated in the ACTION attribute) to process some form data that i had on a web page that i was also testing on my local hard drive.

I'm guessing that without special server software (Apache?) on my computer this would not work. So the question is why not?

thanks

[goofball]

wow - such a general question.
(usually forums like this don't help you much unless your question is more specific)

check out http://www.howstuffworks.com and type 'cgi script' in the search box. That should help answer many of your questions. There's also a million sites out there with free info on CGI scripting and whatnot- just use the search engines

[Scriptage]

C has a built in function to get data passed to it. I would presume this would be the query string from a browser if it had the action of the c program on a web server.
I would PRESUME you would be able to split the data and get the params and values easily.