Re: links and cgi-bin output

BearHeart/Bill Weinman (BearHeart@bearnet.com)
Tue, 19 Dec 1995 00:46:04 -0600


At 07:22 am 12/19/95 +0100, Philippe-Andre Prindeville wrote:
> <a href="http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/converter.pl?word=run#V.3.">
>this doesn't seem to work...

> Am I missing something? Can't you make a reference to an arbitrary
>point in a URL when the URL is a CGI script output? Does this only work
>for precomputed (ie. static) documents? I thought the positioning took
>place within the browser, anyway...

Interesting question. What browser are you using?

The "#" part of the URL (called the "fragment" part) is not actually
part of the URL spec. HTML uses it as a branching directive, but
different browsers may handle it differently. For example, I've never
seen it specified that a browser has to keep the fragment when passing
the "?" (query) part to the server for a CGI call. In fact, the browser
may assume that everything after the "?" is for the CGI program and
ignore the fragment all together.

My opinion is that what you're expecting should be reasonable,
but I wouldn't expect the browser authors to necessarily agree.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* BearHeart / Bill Weinman
* BearHeart@bearnet.com * * http://www.bearnet.com/ *
* Author of The CGI Book: * http://www.bearnet.com/cgibook/ *
* Trust everyone, but brand your cattle.