On every Web Form, you will find a button or link, often labeled "Submit".
When you push this button, two things are sent to the
server:
the data you've typed into the form, and an ACTION.
The ACTION tells the server the name of the program which knows how to process
that form's data. The server simply invokes that program and passes the form's
data to it, and arranges for the output of that program to be sent back to the browser (ordinarily an HTML stream).
Here's an example of how the ACTION is specified in the form open tag:
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://webcom.com/~webcom/cgi-bin/glimpse">
When a form with this open tag is submitted, the data is passed to the
Web server at webcom.com/~webcom, which will invoke the
/cgi-bin/glimpse program
(the WebCom glimpse search facility) to decode the form, process its data, and send a result back to the client (the browser).
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