[8851] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: test of new Location header usage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew McRae)
Wed Aug 9 07:57:11 1995
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 1995 07:53:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew McRae <mcrae@elmer.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: andrew_mcrae@harvard.edu
To: lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <1445.9508091057@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Hi.
On Wed, 9 Aug 1995, lilley wrote:
> I presume your intent by outputting Status:200 is to generate a header? But
> the headers are generated by the server, not the script.
The CGI specification says:
[ From <URL:http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/out.html> ]
] Any headers which are not server directives are sent directly back
] to the client. Currently, this specification defines three server
] directives:
[...]
] Content-type
[...]
] Location
[...]
] Status
]
] This is used to give the server an HTTP/1.0 status line to
] send to the client. The format is nnn xxxxx, where nnn is the 3-digit
] status code, and xxxxx is the reason string, such as "Forbidden".
The spec does not say anything about the issue at hand: what a server
should do when given both a Location: and a Status: header by a CGI
program.
(Just a little rant:)
Honestly, I'm grateful to those who put in the work to produce the CGI
specification. Thank you all. But I get really worried by documents which
call themselves "specifications" and yet repeatedly say things like
"Examples of the command line usage are much better demonstrated than
explained." That's appropriate for a tutorial, but it's utterly hopeless
for anything that's supposed to be definitive.
Cheers,
Andrew.
--
Andrew McRae <andrew_mcrae@harvard.edu>
