The integrated catalog system also provides a series of enhanced HTML resources which enable the site to perform a number of nifty functions, such as detect which browser someone is using. The catalog is managed from the catalog control page, which provides access to all the components of the catalog. Orders are managed from the ordering administration page . All the shopping basket and ordering functionality is handled by the integrated catalog. In typical Web site fashion, the customer can browse around the store adding or removing items from a shopping basket.
Customers can even leave the session and come back on another day to continue the shopping.
More unusual, the customer can create a record of purchases and locations in the virtual store, which can be used on subsequent visits to speed their way through. Finally, the customer can actually purchase the products via a secure Web server. An enhanced HTML file is first interpreted by a program which works with the Web server, an Apache server, and the HTML is sent back to the client. At run time the server, knowing the state of a user's travel's can decide, according to the enhanced HTML commands, to present the user with a particular Web page. This flexibility is only possible at run time and cannot be predesigned.