Re: revised CGI/1.0 specification

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Subject: Re: revised CGI/1.0 specification
From: Markus Stumpf <stumpf@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>
To: robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool)
Date: 	Tue, 23 Nov 1993 19:39:36 +0100
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <9311231611.AA29969@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu> from "Rob McCool" at Nov 23, 93 05:11:37 pm
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Rob,

|>It depends on how you define gateway, and what you're gatewaying to. It
|>seems our definitions are not in sync.

Definitely. But I wanted this to be discussed. Maybe we are not in sync
with others, too :-)

|>                     I'm assuming you're referring to GATE as a new HTTP
|>method. The entry for SERVER_PROTOCOL is confusing since it mentions gopher.
|>I think we may want to change this so it's HTTP only since HTTP servers are
|>going to really use the spec.

Yep, I'd sent another message right after the one you answered to making
a proposal for such a method.
How do you determine what to use for SERVER_PROTOCOL? Is that the type
of daemon that's running? How about GN that supports http and gopher?
Should it set the SERVER_PROTOCOL according to whether it was a gopher
or http request? (that's important, as the script has to answer in the right
format) If we chage to http only, this is of course obvious.

|>I'm not sure what exactly you're talking about by "followed by some protocol
|>specific info"... since you use a URL for the argument to GATE, this could
|>simply be a URL which should contain all the information you need.

With GATE I want a *simple* gateway which only plugs to host/ports.
This means the clients sends a
    GATE <full_url_of_document>
and then a GET or PUT or any other method as it would without using a gateway.

|>                                                                   Thus,
|>ideas spring to mind of a CGI script which is linked with the W3 libraries
|>and does basically what CERN's server does when acting as a gateway. Since
|>the W3 conversion libraries all return HTML, the script could easily pass
|>results back to a Web browser.

And that is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
There is really no need to have the server do the conversion from e.g.
gopher to html as all clients (I know of) are able to do this pretty
well and IMHO much better than a server ever can do. Just think of the nice
little icons Mosaic uses for the various gopher types. Having the
conversion take place in the server makes you loose much of the look 'n feel
that clients can provide. That is IMHO nothing that is desirable.

	\Maex
-- 
______________________________________________________________________________
 Markus Stumpf                        Markus.Stumpf@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE