Novice trying to find my way

mortalhero has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've decided to try and learn perl. My first goal is to simply send a number that a visitor enters into my web page to a perl script, and then send a number back to the same web page. I cannot find a simple answer to this anywhere.

I’m trying to use Frontpage to handle the HTML code and organize everything. I’ve installed iiss for Windows XP and ActivePerl. I was successful running simple perl scripts from the Command Prompt such as… print “hello world\n”;

Also, I was successful with getting the following to appear in a browser;

print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
print "<HTML>\n";
print "<HEAD>\n";
print "<TITLE>Hello World</TITLE>\n";
print "</HEAD>\n";
print "<BODY>\n";
print "<H4>Hello World</H4>\n";
print "<P>\n";
print "Your IP Address is $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR}.\n";
print "<P>";
print "<H5>Have a nice day</H5>\n";
print "</BODY>\n";
print "</HTML>\n";
[download]

But when I create a simple browser page, mypage.htm, in FrontPage and try to run the following and get it to appear in mypage.htm, it opens the Command Prompt and dumps the page’s html code to it;

print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
open HTML, "c:/mypage.htm" or die $!;
while( <HTML> ) {

    print;

}
close HTML;
[download]

I guess my question is, what am I doing wrong? How can I simply get something to appear, where I want it, in my browser from perl?

Thanks, Dave

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