Re: complaint about CGI

john@math.nwu.edu (John Franks)
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Date: Fri, 25 Feb 1994 11:45:08 --100
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From: john@math.nwu.edu (John Franks)
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Subject: Re: complaint about CGI
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According to Ari Luotonen:
> > The question is, what do we do about it? Many people want me to ``fix''
> > httpd so that it sends any unknown headers back to the client. This isn't so
> > bad, and would be backward compatible, but I don't want people to depend on
> > it without formally changing the spec
> 
> I'm all for it.

I am happy with either way as long as we have a clear cut spec that is
well publicized. It is not enough for us to agree among ourselves or
agree on www-talk. If we agree to change, someone (presumably Rob) has
to document the changes.  I think it is unacceptable if people have to
look at the source code of a server to understand the spec.

> 
> > (John, Ari, what did you guys do?).
> 
> Originally I sent back all the headers, but took that off since the
> spec marked this as illegal.
> 

I followed the spec and take only Content-type from the script.

> 
> BTW, Rob: Content-Encoding should be Content-Transfer-Encoding :-(
> 

I agree with this!  But it isn't only Rob's problem. I originally used
Content-Transfer-Encoding until I found that Mosaic won't accept that,
only Content-encoding.  I am also still campaigning for browsers which
handle decoding to announce that fact in an Accept-Encoding (or
whatever the correct name is) header.  Gif and au files may be pretty
well compressed already but for Postscript files, for example,
compression is a *big* win.  Postscript is likely to be a standard way
to distribute math journal articles and it would be very nice to
compress on the fly if the browser can handle it (or decompress if it
can't).


John Franks 	Dept of Math. Northwestern University
		john@math.nwu.edu