[8060] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
CGI 1.1 spec
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Phillips)
Thu Apr 27 01:35:53 1995
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 01:32:08 +0500
Errors-To: procmaster@www19.w3.org
Reply-To: paulp@cerf.net
From: Paul Phillips <paulp@cerf.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
Is there a more definitive copy of the CGI 1.1 spec than the one at
hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu? It has more the sense of a tutorial than a rigorous
specification. In particular, I quote from
<URL:http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/env.html>:
In addition to these, the header lines recieved from the client, if
any, are placed into the environment with the prefix HTTP_ followed by
the header name. Any - characters in the header name are changed to _
characters. The server may exclude any headers which it has already
processed, such as Authorization, Content-type, and Content-length. If
necessary, the server may choose to exclude any or all of these
headers if including them would exceed any system environment limits.
An example of this is the HTTP_ACCEPT variable which was defined in
CGI/1.0. Another example is the header User-Agent.
There is no indication here that the header name should be turned into
all capital letters, as seems to have been done in all the examples.
True, it is a convention that environment variables be represented in all
caps, but "foo" and "FOO" are distinct and a literal interpretation of
the spec would indicate that the env variable should be called HTTP_Accept.
In summary, I know what was *meant*, but I'd much prefer something
unambiguous. Does such a beast exist?
--
Paul Phillips EMAIL: paulp@cerf.net
WWW: http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/ PHONE: (619) 220-0850
