complaint about CGI

Rob McCool ([email protected])
Fri, 25 Feb 1994 11:37:08 --100


One of the most popular (in fact, the only one I've gotten) complaints about
CGI is the fact that the non-nph script's output is stripped of everything
except Location: and Content-type:. Since stuff like content-encoding wasn't
really an issue at the time, it was okay that the server stripped them out.
In fact, the spec. states that only content-type and location are valid
output headers.

The question is, what do we do about it? Many people want me to ``fix''
httpd so that it sends any unknown headers back to the client. This isn't so
bad, and would be backward compatible, but I don't want people to depend on
it without formally changing the spec (John, Ari, what did you guys do?).

Ultimately, though, I'd like to discourage use of parsed scripts in favor of
nph scripts since they're cleaner (server doesn't touch their output). Also,
the script that goes to nph only loses two things: ease of output because it
has to check REQUEST_METHOD etc., and Location: to a file. I don't really
view these as a big loss.

So, the question is, do we change the spec., or do we educate people and
give them library functions to output the header?

--Rob