What do I need to learn to make a website that can make a text file?

Question

I want to make a website, but all I know is basic HTML and CSS. On this website, I want the user to input in multiple text fields (sort of like they take a quiz) and then the program will make a text file based on the user input which the user can download. I want it to work backwards, too, so that the text file is the input.

What do I need to learn to make a website to do this? Will javascript do the trick?

I'm a beginning to intermediate programmer, mainly with java and I've learned some C# recently. I thought I could learn ASP.Net for this, but it turns out my hosting doesn't support it.

Answer 1

Any web framework out there can easily handle this task. So the question is, what do you ultimately want to learn? Do you really want to learn ASP.NET and become proficient at it? If so, start researching doing this in ASP.NET. You can get Visual Web Developer Express for free, and there are plenty of tutorials and books out there. If you need this website to be public, then unfortunately ASP.NET web hosting tends to be more expensive than other options.

If this project you've outlined here is all you ever want to do with web development, then I'd probably just pick PHP. It's simple, easy to learn, and supported by just about all hosts. If your host doesn't support PHP I'd be surprised.

And yes, technically JavaScript can accomplish your needs. But it's strictly client side, so there are many downsides to that. If you don't need this info to come up to the server, then start learning JavaScript.

Answer 2

This could be a reasonably simple application built in PHP (supported by almost all web site hosters) that processes input fields and returns a text file. No database necessary in case the application doesn't need some persistent memory on earlier input or results. There's a lot of PHP learning material available on line - with some programming experience you should be able to have some prototype working in one/two day(s).