Re: Solution to the CGI message trap
From: Marc Slemko (marcs@znep.com)
Date: Tue, Aug 11 1998
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 10:38:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com>
To: Scott Lawrence <lawrence@agranat.com>
cc: ietf-http-ext@w3.org
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.00.9808111037050.223-100000@alive.znep.com>
Subject: Re: Solution to the CGI message trap
On Tue, 11 Aug 1998, Scott Lawrence wrote:
> Jeffrey Mogul wrote:
> >
> > This would be exactly my point ... if a new method is sent to a
> > server which doesn't support the application which uses the new
> > method, so what? Brain dead client application gets what it
> > deserves ... a brain dead response.
> >
> > Right. But the problem remains, how is the client supposed to know
> > whether or not the server supports the application in question?
>
> Why doesn't OPTIONS fit the bill here? If I send OPTIONS and get back
> something that looks like a GET response, I can pretty much figure out that
> I've hit something brain dead.
Sure, but if you don't get something that looks like a GET response then
you know nothing, eg.:
marcs@alive:~$ telnet alive 80
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to alive.znep.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
OPTIONS /cgi-bin/printenv HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 17:35:33 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.2-dev (Unix)
Content-Length: 0
Allow: GET, HEAD, POST, OPTIONS, TRACE
Connection: close
Connection closed by foreign host.
marcs@alive:~$ telnet alive 80
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to alive.znep.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
DELETE /cgi-bin/printenv HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 17:35:47 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.2-dev (Unix)
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain
GATEWAY_INTERFACE=CGI/1.1
UNIQUE_ID=NdCA838AAAEAABPafGA
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