Think of the URL less literally as a directory path, and more as a string that gets passed to the Web server to tell it where to look for a file to serve.

Let's say you have a server whose docroot is at ~myname/httpd. This server is visible at the URL http://www.mysite.com.

Now any file you put into ~myname/httpd, say ~myname/httpd/contact_me.html, is available through the Web server -- in this case as http://www.mysite.com/contact_me.html.

That file doesn't have to be an HTML document; it could also be a script. Save a simple CGI script in the docroot as test.pl and you can now run it by visiting http://www.mysite.com/test.pl. (Maybe; see footnote below.)

You can append even more information to the URL, like http://www.mysite.com/test.pl/12345, and this will still run test.pl with 12345 in $ENV{PATH_INFO}.

Is any of this really necessary for your particular application? I don't really have enough information to say. But it is an alternative to the question-mark way of passing CGI params.

Footnote: Depending on your server configuration, you might not actually be able to execute arbitrarily-named programs from arbitrary directories. So you might actually have to do something like http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/myprog.cgi/more/params/go/here.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: what to use create, .html or .cgi by seattlejohn
in thread what to use create, .html or .cgi by andrew

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