- From: David Robinson <drtr1@cus.cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 21 Nov 95 18:39 GMT
- To: C.J.Adie@ed.ac.uk
- Cc: drtr1@cus.cam.ac.uk, www-talk@w3.org
Chris Adie <C.J.Adie@ed.ac.uk> wrote: > Yes, there are certainly CGI implementations in use right now which don't use > stdio streams - for example, CGI scripts using Visual Basic (which has no > concept of stdin/stdout), or scripts implemented as DLLs. DLLs don't use > environment variables either. This is not perversity, it is just that those > mechanisims are not appropriate to these types of script. > > I believe it is very important to keep the CGI standard as general as > possible. The standard should not include *any* reference to implementation > details of how the server identifies and communicates with the CGI program. > Separate platform-specific specs should do that. So, avoid > implementation-specific terms like "environment variables", and call them > (say) "CGI variables" instead. I disagree. a CGI `specification' wouldn't be much of a specification if it didn't allow a programmer to write a working program based on it. From a practical standpoint, a separate platform-specific spec seems pretty pointless when, for example, the Unix-specific spec is only 9 lines of text. David Robinson.
Received on Tuesday, 21 November 1995 13:39:38 UTC