Re: CGI???

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Thu, 16 Nov 1995 15:47:00 +0000 (GMT)


> > > >8) You've made a quiet change to the behavior of parsed headers -
> > > >requiring that the CGI headers appear before the HTTP headers. [...]

> > There's a problem with this version. The server can't send any data
> > until the Status: header has been seen. [...]

> I don't think this is important. As a practical matter, CGI's don't
> send many headers [...]
>
> BTW, I think the term "CGI headers" is a bit odd, given that Location
> and Content-Type are both HTTP headers, as well. Yeah, okay, you have
> to call them SOMETHING. How about the more cumbersome "CGI-significant
> headers"?

I like the distinction in the CGI documents on hoohoo between HTTP
headers (which the CGI program generates and are sent via the server
directly to the client) and _server_directives_, which are interpreted
by the server and may or may not be sent untouched to the client.

I like to think of a mapping between server directives (from the CGI)
and HTTP headers (from the server); this mapping may be a unity
transform but need not be.

Keeping this distinction also allows a spec to say that CGI programs
should output server directives before HTTP headers.

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|       Manchester and North HPC Training & Education Centre        |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Computer Graphics Unit,             Email: Chris.Lilley@mcc.ac.uk |
| Manchester Computing Centre,        Voice: +44 161 275 6045       |
| Oxford Road, Manchester, UK.          Fax: +44 161 275 6040       |
| M13 9PL                            BioMOO: ChrisL                 |
| Timezone: UTC        URI: http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/staff/lilley/ | 
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+