Re: How to send cookie and redirect in a cgi script?

From: Alan J. Flavell (flavell_at_ph.gla.ac.uk)
Date: 02/27/04 

Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:52:14 +0000

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:

> IMNSHO, this is yet another example of CGI.pm unnecessarily
> abstracting trivial things, and it's remarkable, to say the least,
> that you're not able to figure it out by help of the 3,400+ lines POD.

There's a long-standing problem here. The author maintains the CGI.pm
documentation as a rather useful HTML file, which accompanies his
version of the module.

The Perl porters distribute their core version of CGI.pm (just as they
do with other core modules) with POD-format documentation - which then
can be optionally HTML-ified within their installation script.

Unfortunately, these two versions of the documentation are not very
consistent with each other. The POD documentation is quite old, and
tends to lag behind the changes to the code.

> Other things than my solution can be said to have the "wrong
> emphasis". ;-)

I would definitely recommend to users that they get the author's own
HTML-format documentation for CGI.pm (NOT the HTML-ified POD).
Perhaps the version that corresponds to the version of CGI.pm that
they get to use - or better, if they can, to install a current version
of CGI.pm as a separate module, rather than relying on the version
which happened to come with their core distribution.

While it's true that the HTML documentation has no example shown of
cookie-with-redirect - despite it (apparently[1]) being a frequently
wanted procedure and frequently asked question - nevertheless, it
seems to me that the documentation is set out quite clearly, with
"Creating the HTTP Header" as main section header, and "Creating the
Standard Header for a Virtual Document" and "Creating the Header for a
Redirection Request" as the two sub-section headers, which I think
makes it pretty clear what is wanted here.

all the best

[1] I'm no great fan of cookies myself, and I routinely reject them if
they are offered from a server [browser alert enabled] without any
explanation of any benefits they might bring me as a user.

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