What types of data can be put into a web page database?
The first thing a webmaster must do to use a web page database is to define the database record structure and the index fields for searching. Most web page databases accept only a de-normalized data structure consisting of one record type. A delimited text file is the most common form of input. Each record in the database has the same number of fields. Think of the structure of a two dimensional spreadsheet where all the rows have the same columns. The data for the database can be prepared and maintained in any PC database program, spreadsheet, or text editor. The data supplied to the web page database must be prepared according to the vendor specifications. Here is a sample of the data file that is provided to the Office Directory demo applet. It contains 4 or 5 fields per record each separated by commas. For this web page database the first field contains the database index as a string of 0’s and 1’s. This index saves storage in the HTML document. There is a byte in the index field f
