Re: Why is my form sending garbage?

Scripsit Rich Grise:

[Crossposted: alt.html,perl.beginners.cgi,because it's and HTML form
calling a perl CGI script.]

I wonder what the latter group is. I guess it has a limited
distribution.

Anyway, you should first check what gets sent as form data. If it is
wrong, you may have an HTML problem. If it is OK, then the problem is
not in HTML.

Here is the (abbreviated) form
I'm using:
http://mysite.verizon.net/richgrise/...2captions.html (The
submit button won't work, I've got action on my local box.)

Huh? Yes, it does not work. Why don't you try making it work?

And why are you using XHTML? And invalid XHTML at that.

and here's the source:
http://mysite.verizon.net/richgrise/...tions.html.txt

I think people can be expected to know how to View Source, if you expect
help from them.

And here's its output from that script's interpretation of my form:

It looks like normal multipart form data, uninterpreted. I don't see
what you are trying to ask.

But the site where I got this script:
http://bignosebird.com/formls1.shtml
offers a test html:
http://mysite.verizon.net/richgrise/...g/funform.html

Looks like their form defaults the enctype attribute while yours has
enctype="multipart/form-data". Apparently their script cannot handle
multipart data. This is a good reason to find a better script. Other
reasons include the following:
- it generates invalid HTML as the response
- when installed, it sets up an open relay, which can be used and will
be used by spammers to send spam thru your server, creating troubles for
you, too.
(It takes a form field and directly uses it as E-mail destination
address. This means that anyone or anything can use it to send E-mail to
anyone, as often as desired.)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/