Interfacing Relational Databases to the Web Why would one want
to link a database to the web? A better question might be, “Why
wouldn't one want to link a database to the web?” Static HTML
pages are good for many things: documentation, hypertext books,
personal pages and other unchanging information. However, static
pages present a few problems: Static pages can be a hassle to
maintain. If one is managing a large site with thousands of
pages, changing just the “look and feel” of the site will
involve either an inordinate amount of work or a long evening
with CGI and Perl. This gets even nastier when the content of
the site changes. Static pages don't allow for user input,
feedback or collaboration. Suppose you want to add a message
board to your static web site. You can set up a form that mails
user comments to the webmaster, who manually puts them on a
page—you can even set up a script to do this. However, this
presents a few problems, as we shall discuss later. Static pages
don't allow you to operate a web