Re: your mail

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From: Charles Henrich <henrich@rs560.cl.msu.edu>
Message-id: <9312282351.AA24924@rs560.cl.msu.edu>
Subject: Re: your mail
To: www-talk-request@www0.cern.ch (John Franks)
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1993 18:50:58 -0500 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <9312282330.AA05364@hopf.math.nwu.edu> from "John Franks" at Dec 28, 93 05:30:49 pm
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> Using Charles Henrich's suggested syntax, for example, URLs like
>
>     http://host/path/script;
>     http://host/path/script;foo
>     http://host/path/script;foo?bar
>
> would all be scripts.  I.e. the presence of the ';' indicates it is
> executable.  An trailing ';' just indicates an empty PATH_INFO.

Actually, no I wouldnt suggest using a ';' to represent executable.  The
current manner to determine if a script is a script is "good enough".  In fact
using the ';' to determine if a script was would disallow most of what Im
doing.  I use the inlined include facility of NCSA's server extensivly.  I want
the server to return

http://host/path/document

And then the document calls an inlined include which can then decipher the ';'
attributes, making  all sorts of interesting things possible.

I'd like to say, this syntax could be *in addition* to the current method, it
doesnt need to replace it.  Im finding a situation here where the forced
"stat'ing" of non-existant files to be distasteful, wasteful, and a very
potential problem with servers that are heavily utilized.

-Crh

    Charles Henrich     Michigan State University     henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu

                     http://rs560.msu.edu/~henrich/