- From: Laura Lemay, Killer of Trees <lemay@lne.com>
- Date: Sat, 29 Apr 95 23:12 EDT
- To: paulp@cerf.net, Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
>> Is there any interest for a new look at the CGI spec? I don't just mean at >> NCSA.... > >Yes. For example, what purpose does PATH_TRANSLATED serve? It appears >to be a catentation of the document root and the PATH_INFO, which is >superfluous if both those are available. If this is correct, it should >be deprecated in a coming CGI version. Um, not really. User directories don't map onto document root. And CERN allows mapping of wildly differing file system paths onto virtual URL paths (there's no concept of a single DocumentRoot in CERN's httpd as there is in NCSA). Without PATH_TRANSLATED, it becomes impossible to figure out where the actual file system location of the file in PATH_INFO is (which sounds an awful lot like the problem that DOCUMENT_ROOT is supposed to be solving?) Just as a side note I wish there was a better way of passing file names back to the server than in the path info. It looks really wierd in the URL and it only allows you to pass back a single name. I'd rather there was a generic method of translating virtual paths to actual path names that I could use in my scripts. If this existed, there woulnd't be a need for a DOCUMENT_ROOT environment variable at all -- just translate "/" and you're done. But I do agree that if NCSA is making unilateral changes to CGI that someone needs to revisit the spec and update the docs. Remember, the "C" stands for "Common." Laura lemay@lne.com
Received on Saturday, 29 April 1995 23:11:39 UTC