CGI Suggestion

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Date: Tue, 28 Dec 93 14:44:16 -0600
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9312282044.AA10003@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu>
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: CGI Suggestion
In-reply-to: <9312281607.AA17465@crh.cl.msu.edu>
References: <9312281607.AA17465@crh.cl.msu.edu>
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Charles Henrich 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!

This isn't going to fly as a change for URLs per se; as far as URLs
go, everything after the third slash is opaque, which is as it should
be.  So if possible let's at least restrict this discussion to CGI.

Cheers,
Marc