I'm discovering that it's more complicated for me than perhaps for some others on account of UTF8 encoding issues. I need to decode text coming in from the form, but with the AJAX apparently connecting to just the specified function/subroutine from the perl script, even the initial "my/our" variable declarations seem to be bypassed on the callback, and the code ends up trying to decode the UTF8 characters twice--which either results in an error message, or (without decoding), text that is incorrectly displayed. I wish I understood exactly what the AJAX is doing and/or needing to do in terms of following the code.
I still seem to be no further along than I was at the start. However, I may have to run some experiments on text using pure English….so much for being a polyglot!