Re: Semicolon's for all

John Franks (john@math.nwu.edu)
Sat, 1 Jan 1994 20:28:56 -0600 (CST)

According to Rob McCool:
> Anyway, in a later message, John Franks pointed out something interesting,
> and I just went back and verified it. The current speicifcation says nothing
> about how you're supposed to get the path information, it just says that the
> information comes at the end of the path. Therefore, a server author like
> John could conceivably decide to impose the restriction that path
> information must start with a ; when accessing a script under GN and still
> be fully compliant to CGI/1.0.
>
> It would disappoint me to have GN act in a very different fashion than other
> servers since the entire point of this exercise was to make a unified
> gateway interface, however, as I've argued in the past, the URL after the
> third slash is the server's business. Therefore, if he wants to do that, he
> is within the specification to do so.
>

My only interest in implementing CGI is to make scripts written for
other servers usable with gn. It would be silly to do an
implementation which wouldn't achieve that. What I was referring to was
something like requiring that for gn in the "path/cmd/args" part of
the URL the "cmd" must end in a ';'. Thus a URL would look like

http://host/foo1/foo2;/foo3

Any other semi-colons would have to be URL encoded. The PATH_INFO
would be "/foo3" and SCRIPT_NAME would be "/foo1/foo2;". Of course, the
filesystem name would be "/data_root/foo1/foo2". This
is CGI compliant and I think it would work with all the scripts which
work under NCSA httpd. This syntax shouldn't disappoint Rob, but it
disappoints me. I am still trying to think of a better way.

John Franks Dept of Math. Northwestern University
john@math.nwu.edu