I have a Dumb Question

[warbishop]

This has got to be one of the worst question on the forum but anyway, ...since I'm hiding behind the cloak of a profile..lol


"what is the difference between CGI and Java and Javscript?"

thanks for not laughing up a lung...
War

[Charles]

The only dumb question is the one un-asked.

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI, http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/intro.html) Is a behind-the-scenes way that programs on a computer can use the internet to communicate with each other. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a what happens over the internet itself and CGI is the link between a script or program and HTTP. Those scripts are commonly written in the bestest computer language that there is, Perl, or some other, inferior language.

Java and JavaScrpt are simply two scripting languages, though Java pretends to be a programming language. (A programming language gets compiled into machine code and it is that code that runs directly on the computer. A script gets 'interpreted' at run time. Java gets 'compiled' into something that's not machine language and that stuff is then interperted.) The two are very different so you must be careful not to say Java when you mean JavaScript.

[warbishop]

thanks for all the insight. I appreciate you putting the time and effort into that explanation. It helped me alot. Still, I've gotten pretty good at the HTML code but as we all know, its not too tough. The others I'm getting into offer a much higher bar for me and will require a much greater amout of time in order for me to grasp it. Javascript, from what I've seen, looks to be awful tough. I hope I'm wrong and I can choke it down. But right now, I really feel it might take a lot of reading and studying for me to understand it. In corparating it into my pages is one thing, but actually writing the code, when it doesnt look very friendly, might be a tall task for me. I might need to get some good reading material. Something that really breaks it down for me... any ideas?

again, thanks for the time you took for me and take care.

war

[Charles]

First be sure that you really do know HTML. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the 4.01 Specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/).

[AdamGundry]

There are plenty of good JavaScript tutorials on the Internet - you could try this one.

Alternatively, check out the (rather large) tutorials category at dmoz.org.

Good luck!

Adam