embedding a web resource
 

Hello. Pardon my ignorance, but is it possible to embed the "college navigator" search object on the left side of this page: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ ? I can get some of it to look right when pasting source code into a webpage, but the input fields don't work, and the "show results" button doesn't show up. It seems there's a slick way, through code, of making those function. I'm changing some of the URLs to the full site URLs, thinking it might make it work right. Something must be done with the button. Or am I way off base thinking it is possible? I could link it, but embedding the resource would be slick.

You can copy the html source of the web form, change the action attribute in the form-tag to your own script written in something like php, ruby , perl. From this script you make a curl call with the given parameters to the original form action. This way you might get the response you want from College Navigator. Please ask your lawyer whether this is legally ok. Or even better ask "http://nces.ed.gov" whether you are alowed to act this way. If they do not like the idea you have to drop it.

Cheers
j

I so greatly appreciate your response. Although I don't yet know how to go about the described actions, I'm looking forward to chasing them down, and being pointed in the right direction is so helpful. I'm ultimately going to put them in a html5 generator, and should have mentioned it. The US gov't is usually very open about making resources embeddable, and seem pretty open here*. I asked them for an embed code a couple months ago, and have received no response. You are right about assessing the legality of it all. Copyright is no issue, but maybe squatting on their server is. Thanks again.

*REPLICATION: Unless specifically stated otherwise, all information on the U.S. Department of Education's NCES website at http://nces.ed.gov is in the public domain, and may be reproduced, published or otherwise used without NCES' permission. This statement does not pertain to information at websites other than http://nces.ed.gov, whether funded by or linked to, from NCES or not.

Please use the following citation when referencing NCES products and publications:
National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.