- From: Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
- Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 17:24:19 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Dylan Barrell <dbarrell@hotmail.com>
- Cc: http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
> Why is there absolutely no mention of the CGI interaction between the HTTP > daemon and the CGI programs? Surely this standard should specify which peices> the header are made available to CGI programs and how they are made available Because CGI is not an IETF spec, it was a hack put together by Ari Luotenen of CERN and Rob McCool at NCSA to allow people to plug stuff into both their servers. While their Netscape server supports CGI the prefered way to plug in a module is via NSAPI which is much more efficient because it does not spawn a process for each transaction. CGI is completely inappropriate to standardize in the IETF. It is operating system specific and its an API and not a protocol. The W3C might have an interest in producing a spec but I would not count on it. It might be nice to have a document readily available with Ari and Rob's names on it but it really isn't a technology that should be considered leading edge at this point. NSAPI and ISAPI have replaced it, there are many, many such APIs and there is no particular reason to consider CGI as a special case even if popular Web books have "CGI" on the cover in letters three inch high. Phill
Received on Thursday, 29 May 1997 14:28:02 UTC