[Omaha.pm] Perl CGI, start_form(), and alt tags...

[Dan Linder]

I'm working on a simple Perl CGI script that displays some data in a
table, and allows the user to click on a button to drill down into
that specific data.  The code presents the drill-down links as
submit-type buttons in the table, and that seems to be my issue.

The table data is useful in itself as something that might be
cut-n-past'ed into an e-mail.  Unfortunately, the data that is used
for the submit button text isn't captured when the user tries to copy
the table.  Here's a bit of HTML that shows this behavior:
======= begin HTML =======
<table border=1>
<td>Omaha</td>
<td>
<form method="post" action="drilldown.cgi" alt="111">
  <input type=submit value='111' alt='111'></input>
</form>
</td>

<td>
<form method="post" action="drilldown.cgi" alt="222">
  <input type=submit value='222' alt='222'></input>
</form>
</td>

<td align=center>33.3%</td>
</tr>
</table>
======= end HTML =======

If you view that with Firefox, the first and last columns are simple
text, and the middle two columns are buttons with alternative text.
When a user copies-and-pastes this into a text editor, only the
"Omaha" and "33.3%" fields are copied, the "111" and "222" are copied
as blank cells.

I tried adding "alt=" values to the submit buttons but that didn't help.

Anyone have other ideas?

Thanks,

Dan

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