How is an HTML page interactive with the ? Tutorial?

My questions concerns the increasing usage of the ? after the .html extension. How is this possible? I though HTML files were static. Did they become interactive?

Public Comments

  1. I don't know about that, but this site has a lot of information on HTML: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/overview.html
  2. It`s not only HTML. When you use PHP or JSP with a form with GET method, the ? appears. If I remember well, some other scripts use that symbol (perl?). That`s what I know. Maybe is not so clear, but one thing is certain, it`s not only HTML.
  3. its part of the response stream. anytime you put a ?x=123&y=3333 it gets sent to the server like as if an input element was on the page. The server software catches this & parses it into usable key value pairs. It just chops that stuff off when looking for the page. If you have a rudimentary web server, it will just give you a 404 error. You're probably confused because its showing a .html extension. The site in question has to be using a server side technology. CGI / Perl can do that, or any number of others such as PHP or ASP.NET can do it & rewrite the url as a html file as its output to the browser to confuse hackers. They're called QueryStrings. Google querystring & you'll get info on how each language utilizes them.
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