Re: test of new Location header usage

Andrew McRae (mcrae@elmer.harvard.edu)
Wed, 9 Aug 1995 07:53:56 -0400 (EDT)


Hi.
On Wed, 9 Aug 1995, lilley wrote:
> I presume your intent by outputting Status:200 is to generate a header? But
> the headers are generated by the server, not the script.

The CGI specification says:

[ From <URL:http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/out.html> ]
] Any headers which are not server directives are sent directly back
] to the client. Currently, this specification defines three server
] directives:
[...]
] Content-type
[...]
] Location
[...]
] Status
]
] This is used to give the server an HTTP/1.0 status line to
] send to the client. The format is nnn xxxxx, where nnn is the 3-digit
] status code, and xxxxx is the reason string, such as "Forbidden".

The spec does not say anything about the issue at hand: what a server
should do when given both a Location: and a Status: header by a CGI
program.

(Just a little rant:)
Honestly, I'm grateful to those who put in the work to produce the CGI
specification. Thank you all. But I get really worried by documents which
call themselves "specifications" and yet repeatedly say things like
"Examples of the command line usage are much better demonstrated than
explained." That's appropriate for a tutorial, but it's utterly hopeless
for anything that's supposed to be definitive.

Cheers,
Andrew.

--
Andrew McRae  <andrew_mcrae@harvard.edu>