Re: CGI Suggestion

Bruce Speyer (speyer@mcc.com)
Tue, 28 Dec 93 10:29:34 CST


Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu> 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!
>
>Thoughts?

A general solution can't avoid stat'ing/resolving at each directory level
unless scenarios like gateways accessed through gateways are disallowed.
This would be problematic. Also, each gateway may require additional information
needed to stat/resolve which means information contained within pathnames
although the information may be notated as virtual directories. For example:

http://machine/Spanish/latest-config/documentpath;info

-Bruce