Re: CGI/1.1 draft

robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool)
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Date: Sun, 6 Mar 1994 16:47:11 --100
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From: robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: CGI/1.1 draft
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/*
 * Re: CGI/1.1 draft  by John Franks
 *    written on Mar  1,  9:40am.
 *
 * I guess I would favor keeping current practice, but I would not object
 * violently a change in this area.  I do want to make sure that the spec
 * is very specific on this point though.  If PATH_INFO is unescaped we
 * must say so explicitly and say what this means, i.e. does unescaping
 * include '+' -> space translation or just the %hex decoding.  My 
 * understanding when I did this was that unescaping included both and that's
 * the way my server works.  If this is wrong then I would like to fix
 * it.  "URL decoding" might be a better term than "unescaping".
 */

A misconception I had was that + and ' ' were interchangable. Someone has
told me that in fact, no, the + is only applicable within a query string,
not within a URI. Since the spec. specifically says URL decoding and the URL
spec says no + to ' ' mapping in a URI, PATH_INFO should only have %
decoding done on it. I will be changing NCSA httpd's behavior to be % only
in PATH_INFO (but + and % in QUERY_STRING).

--Rob