Re: CGI Suggestion

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Date: Tue, 28 Dec 93 10:29:34 CST
From: speyer@mcc.com (Bruce Speyer)
Message-id: <9312281629.AA22591@faith.mcc.com>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: CGI Suggestion
In-reply-to: Mail from 'Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu>'
      dated: Tue, 28 Dec 1993 11:07:23 -0500 (EST)
Content-Length: 1092

Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu> writes:
>I would like to propose that instead of (or if we must, as well as) allowing
>the embedding of information in the path (which is really poor!) we should
>special case the character ';' to mean end of URL for the client.  This would
>allow folks to use
>
>http://machine/documentpath;info that can be passed to programs.
>
>In the above case the server would return the document /documentpath, but keep
>the ';' information intact for scripts and programs. Forcing the server to have
>to stat each directory level is an incredibly waste of resources, and thats
>doubly so for AFS!
>
>Thoughts?

A general solution can't avoid stat'ing/resolving at each directory level
unless scenarios like gateways accessed through gateways are disallowed.
This would be problematic.  Also, each gateway may require additional information
needed to stat/resolve which means information contained within pathnames
although the information may be notated as virtual directories.  For example:

  http://machine/Spanish/latest-config/documentpath;info

-Bruce