To make this feasible, IFS modellers had to be able to make their models
read from, and write to, Web pages with as little ado as they would
write a Fortran format or a Modula write command. To accomplish
this, some technical trickery is needed. There is a standard protocol
for
sending data from Web forms to the server, and for indicating to the
server that it must pass information to a program
rather than sending back a pre-existing HTML file. However, to tell the
server which program to
run, and how to pass it the data from the client, one has to (for most
servers) program in a scripting language such as Rexx or Perl, and also
know a considerable amount about the CGI interface and HTTP protocol.
IFS economists are not systems programmers; but even systems programmers
have more worthwhile things to do than this level of programming.