CGI Programming on the World Wide Web

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3. Output from the Common Gateway Interface

Contents:
Overview
CGI and Response Headers
Accept Types and Content Types
The Content-length Header
Server Redirection
The "Expires" and "Pragma" Headers
Status Codes
Complete (Non-Parsed) Headers

3.1 Overview

As described in Chapter 3, Output from the Common Gateway Interface, CGI programs are requested like any other regular documents. The difference is that instead of returning a static document, the server executes a program and returns its output. As far as the browser is concerned, however, it expects to get the same kind of response that it gets when it requests any document, and it's up to the CGI program to produce output that the browser is comfortable with.

The most basic output for a CGI program is a simple document in either plain text or HTML, which the browser displays as it would any document on the Web. However, there are other things you can do, such as:

Each of these techniques involves knowing a little bit about returning additional headers from the CGI program.


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