CGI.pm idiosyncrasy?

dusk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow monks,

I encountered a strange problem while writing a CGI script for a site I'm developing. Here's the scoop:

print header,

  start_html (-title => 'Welcome to 0.0.0.0!',
              Link ({-rel => 'stylesheet', type => 'text/css', href =>
+ 'style.css'}),
              base ({-href => 'http://0.0.0.0/cgi-bin/dir/'}),
             ),

  body ({-vlink => 'black'})
[download]

The preceeding causes the proceeding:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US"><head><title>T
+he POSIX Network</title>
</head><body <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /
+>="&lt;base href=&quot;http://skeptical.no-ip.com/cgi-bin/posixnet/&q
+uot; /&gt;"><body vlink="black" />,
[download]

As you can see, it appears as the opening body tag is not being closed, and the tag delimters are converted into their counter-equivalent (whatever that means) [<, >, "]

Any explanation of what is going on will be helpful.

Regards,
Dusk

Comment on CGI.pm idiosyncrasy? Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CGI.pm idiosyncrasy? by Trimbach (Curate) on May 30, 2001 at 07:56 UTC
The "base" and "vlink" tags both belong in the "start_html" method when you're using CGI.pm. There is no "body" function per se in CGI.pm, so by typing it the module is assuming you know what you're doing and pretends it's a valid tag. Your "body" function doesn't "enclose" anything, so CGI.pm makes the perfectly valid guess that "body" is a self-closing tag like "break " and puts the closing slash within the tag per XHTML 1.0 guidelines. You're getting similar problems with "base" which should also be an attribute of start_html, and not it's own function/method. Try this instead: (untested) `print header, start_html (-title => 'Welcome to 0.0.0.0!', Link ({-rel => 'stylesheet', type => 'text/css', href => + 'style.css'}), base => 'http://0.0.0.0/cgi-bin/dir/', vlink => "Black");` [download] For more info check out the "start_html" docs in the CGI.pm POD. Gary Blackburn Trained Killer	[reply] [d/l]
Re: CGI.pm idiosyncrasy? by Zaxo (Archbishop) on May 30, 2001 at 09:35 UTC
<it>start_html({ ...</it> `-head=>[Link({{-rel => 'stylesheet', type => 'text/css', href => 'style.css'}),],` [download] To distribute the -head key the usual ref convention of CGI.pm applies After Compline Zaxo	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: CGI.pm idiosyncrasy? by dws (Chancellor) on May 30, 2001 at 10:09 UTC
Changing `body ({-vlink => 'black'})` to `body ({-vlink => 'black'}, '')` will solve one of the remaining problems.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: CGI.pm idiosyncrasy? by hackmare (Pilgrim) on May 30, 2001 at 16:49 UTC
You have a misplaced body tag which is nonsensical in the start_html context Try this program (note that it doesnt send xhtml). (Tested on solaris with perl5.0503) Script: `#!/usr/bin/perl use CGI; use strict; my $p = new CGI; print $p->header; print $p->start_html(-title=>'Welcome to 0.0.0.0!', -author=>'ronan@hackmare.com', -base=>{href => 'http://0.0.0.0/cgi-bin/dir/'}, -meta=>{'keywords'=>'pharoah secret mummy', 'copyright'=>'Hackmarish Things Happening'}, -style=>{'src'=>'/styles/style1.css'}, -dtd=>1, -BGCOLOR=>'blue', -vlink => 'black'); print $p->p('Is this what you want?'); print $p->end_html;` Returns: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN"> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Welcome to 0.0.0.0!</TITLE> <LINK REV=MADE HREF="mailto:ronan%40hackmare.com"> <BASE HREF="http://localhost/perlmonk.pl"> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="pharoah secret mummy"> <META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="Hackmarish Things Happening"> <LINK REL="stylesheet" HREF="/styles/style1.css"> </HEAD><BODY BGCOLOR="blue" VLINK="black"><P>Is this what you want?</P></BODY></HTML> This code was adapted from the CGI.pm html POD --hackmare	[reply]