- From: Chris Adie <C.J.Adie@ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 10:19:58 +0000
- To: David Robinson <drtr1@cus.cam.ac.uk>
- Cc: www-talk@w3.org
David Robinson <drtr1@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote: > Chris Adie <C.J.Adie@ed.ac.uk> wrote: > > ... > > 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. That is arguable - splitting a specification into system-independant and system-dependant parts is not uncommon. > 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. That is because CGI was developed for UNIX systems. I'm not going to fight hard for the UNIX-specific spec to be physically in a separate document; however I do believe the CGI spec should define the semantics of CGI variables and CGI data i/o in a non-implementation-specific way. In fact, your spec very nearly achieves this. When talking about data input/output from the CGI script, you say "Unless defined otherwise, this will be via the `standard input' file descriptor." Why not use the same form of words for CGI variables? Regards, Chris Adie Phone: +44 131 650 6773 Edinburgh University Computing Service Fax: +44 131 650 6552 James Clark Maxwell Building Email: C.J.Adie@ed.ac.uk Kings Buildings Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, United Kingdom
Received on Wednesday, 22 November 1995 05:18:13 UTC