Re: CGI and typing files by suffix

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Message-id: <9401111518.AA04093@dxmint.cern.ch>
Date:         Tue, 11 Jan 94 10:11:49 EST
From: Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
Subject:      Re: CGI and typing files by suffix
To: Jim Davis <davis@DRI.cornell.edu>, www-talk@www0.cern.ch
In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 10 Jan 1994 09:46:31 -0500
Content-Length: 1112

>We will be better served in the long run if we do not base our
>designs on the current implementation of AFS or for that matter Unix.
>Clock cycles get cheaper every day, but every kludgy feature you
>add is paid for in human labor, which grows ever more expensive.

Not all of us accept the arguments of some of you that the elegance
of hiding the fact that a URL is a script is a Good Thing.  I
continue to believe that the idea of having script authors identify
scripts versus files by what directory the files reside in, or
the execute bit, or something in the server config file is far
from the best solution.  I believe the .CGI suffix (or even better
.EXEC or .SCRIPT) -- ie explicit naming of scripts -- is the way
to go.

This notion that it's important to be able to replace files with
scripts without changing file names is only one argument.  I think
if you want the masses to be able to write HTML and share HTML
documents from server to server it's better if scripts are
flagged explicitly, not by some server-dependent "out-of-band"
notation.



/Rich Wiggins, CWIS Coordinator, Michigan State U