[9317] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: CGI???
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Robinson)
Tue Nov 21 13:41:21 1995
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 95 18:39 GMT
From: drtr1@cus.cam.ac.uk (David Robinson)
To: C.J.Adie@ed.ac.uk
Cc: drtr1@cus.cam.ac.uk, www-talk@w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Chris Adie <C.J.Adie@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> Yes, there are certainly CGI implementations in use right now which don't use
> stdio streams - for example, CGI scripts using Visual Basic (which has no
> concept of stdin/stdout), or scripts implemented as DLLs. DLLs don't use
> environment variables either. This is not perversity, it is just that those
> mechanisims are not appropriate to these types of script.
>
> I believe it is very important to keep the CGI standard as general as
> possible. The standard should not include *any* reference to implementation
> details of how the server identifies and communicates with the CGI program.
> Separate platform-specific specs should do that. So, avoid
> implementation-specific terms like "environment variables", and call them
> (say) "CGI variables" instead.
I disagree. a CGI `specification' wouldn't be much of a specification if it
didn't allow a programmer to write a working program based on it.
From a practical standpoint, a separate platform-specific spec seems pretty
pointless when, for example, the Unix-specific spec is only 9 lines of text.
David Robinson.
