Simple but useful tools for interactive WWW development

An important area for World Wide Web (WWW) development is customized educational web pages incorporating interactive features. Unfortunately, it is usually necessary for an engineering instructor to expend a substantial amount of time to learn the peculiarities of programming and debugging web-based interactive applications. To help eliminate this time hurdle a description is given in this paper of a set of software routines which allow an instructor to prepare a set of quiz questions or drill problems in the form of ordinary text files, then to convert the files automatically into hypertext markup language (HTML) with an interactive "forms" interface for inclusion in a web site. The relatively simple examples considered in this paper are intended to serve as templates for those individuals who are interested in probing more deeply into the intricacies of web software. Examples and computer code are also available.