CGI/1.1 draft

Rob McCool ([email protected])
Tue, 1 Mar 1994 09:43:00 --100


Here are my proposals for changes to CGI, to make its version 1.1:

1. Any headers output by non-nph scripts which the server doesn't understand
may be passed to the client.

2. Add a new env. variable called HTTP_EXTRA_HEADERS which contains all
headers sent by the client which the server didn't understand. This does
not include Authorized, Accept, Content-type, or Content-length as these
are already elsewhere in the CGI variable space. The server may perform
collapsing of these lines, i.e. it may consolidate multiple occurrences
of these lines as it already does with HTTP_ACCEPT.

---
Discussion:

1: This is has already been discussed and largely agreed upon as a Good Idea. It's backward compatible with CGI/1.0 behavior, and fits nicely in.

2: This will allow stupid pet tricks like using From:, but more importantly, allows us to not need to update the CGI spec every time a new header is introduced.

Finally, note that I don't mention whether PATH_INFO should be unescaped or not. My first impression is that it should remain escaped, in order to avoid ambiguities like the decoding of foo="1%3d2". Problem is, all of the current implementations are ``broken'', and therefore such a change technically isn't backward compatible. So perhaps we should update the spec. to reflect the implementations. Comments?

--Rob