From: Niklas Frykholm <niklas@...>
Date: 2001-09-19T02:30:20+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21345] Re: Suggestions for new CGI lib

[Niklas Frykholm]
> While it is true that the request method in HTTP is either POST or
> GET, most servers (at least Apache) will send you both "post" and
> "get" variables, in a situation like this:
> 
>     <form action="test.cgi?get=data">
>         <input type=hidden name=post value=data>
>     </form>

[Todd Gillespie]
> Then that violates the spec.

Perhaps I was not clear, I meant that you will get data both on stdin,
and in ENV['QUERY_STRING']. This doesn't violate any spec that I am
aware of. At least I cannot find anything in RFC 2068 saying that the
abs_path in a POST-request cannot contain a query string.

I think that what makes the design of a CGI library a bit tricky is
that in 99 % of the cases you just want to do

    cgi['user']  ---> "Niklas"

But then there are the remaining 1 % where you need to know whether
the data came from stdin, the query string or a cookie, need to handle
forms where there are multiple fields with the same name, need to
handle multipart forms, etc.

A good library should support both cases.

// Niklas