Python CGI script and CSS style sheet

[epsilon]

Tim,

Thanks for the information and I'll work with you suggestions.  Also,
I will let you know what I find.

Thanks again,
Christopher


Tim Chase wrote:
> > I'm working with a Python CGI script that I am trying to use with an
> > external CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and it is not reading it from the
> > web server.  The script runs fine minus the CSS formatting.  Does
> > anyone know if this will work within a Python CGI?  It seems that line
> > 18 is not being read properly.  One more thing.  I tested this style
> > sheet with pure html code (no python script) and everything works
> > great.
> >
> > Listed below is a modified example.
> >
> > ++++++++++
> >
> > 1    #!/usr/bin/python
> > 2
> > 3    import cgi
> > 4
> > 5    print "Content-type: text/html\n"
>
> The answer is "it depends".  Mostly on the configuration of your
> web-server.  Assuming you're serving out of a cgi-bin/ directory,
> you'd be referencing
>
>    http://example.com/cgi-bin/foo.py
>
> If your webserver (apache, lighttpd, whatever) has been
> configured for this directory to return contents of
> non-executable items, your above code will reference
>
>    http://example.com/cgi-bin/central.css
>
> and so you may be able to just drop the CSS file in that directory.
>
> However, I'm fairly certain that Apache can be (and often is)
> configured to mark folders like this as "execute only, no
> file-reading".  If so, you'll likely get some sort of Denied
> message back if you fetch the CSS file via HTTP.
>
> A better way might be to reference the CSS file as
> "/media/central.css"
>
> 12 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
> href="/media/central.css" />
>
> and then put it in a media folder which doesn't have the
> execute-only/no-read permission set.
>
> Another (less attractive) alternative is to have your CGI sniff
> the incoming request, so you can have both
>
>   http://example.com/cgi-bin/foo.py
>   http://example.com/cgi-bin/foo.py?file=css
>
> using the 'file' GET parameter to return the CSS file instead of
> your content.  I'd consider this ugly unless deploy-anywhere is
> needed, in which case it's not so bad because the deployment is
> just the one .py file (and optionally an external CSS file that
> it reads and dumps).
>
> -tkc