Re: CGI???

> The Macintosh doesn't use stdio/stdout either. The server communicates
> with CGI programs via event structures. It also happens to be a popular
> Web server platform. The concept of stdin/stdout is showing its age,
> and doesn't translate well at all to integrated GUI environments.

Well, some integrated GUI environments, anyway. Works fine on others.

Now, I know Perl CGI programs can be ported to the Mac. Does this
require changing all the I/O operations to use something else? If so,
I would argue that calling this a "CGI" environment is innacurate. If
not, then apparently there is some way of turning the event streams
into what appear to be I/O streams that can be used by a CGI
implementation.

> In fact, let's be brutally honest. CGI itself is one big ugly hack
> piggybacking on HTTP, especially the QUERY_STRING beast. Spaces to plus?
> Escaped chars? Hello? Those are implementation-specific hacks if I've ever
> seen any. We shouldn't be burdened with the complications of Un*x. It
> has its own idiosyncratic and drastically different behavior.

While this makes sense, it makes even more sense to avoid burdening an
application that doesn't need and shouldn't have a GUI with the
complications of a GUI environment. Given that, can you come up with a
specification that makes sense in both environments and allows
programs to be ported between them? If not, then possibly CGI should
be targetted at environments that support a CLI. GUI-only systems will
need something different. Platforms that have both a GUI and a CLI can
then implement both and take advantage of applications written for
either one.

	<mike

Received on Friday, 17 November 1995 16:40:42 UTC