Referrer key missing form os.environ dictionary?

[Terry Reedy]

On 9/25/2013 8:11 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:18:41 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>>> The Referer is not an environment variable.
>>
>> It is when you're writing a CGI app.
>>
>>> How would your shell know what URL you were just browsing?
>>
>> Because the HTTP server sets those environment variables before invoking
>> the CGI app.
>
>
> I stand corrected.
>
>
> That's a pretty shitty design though, isn't it? Communicating via
> environment variables. What is this, 1998? :-)

1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

> Mind you, I'm not sure what other alternatives exist.

Send a series of lines with the same info over an input channel, as was 
done 3 years later for FastCGI. Since CGI uses stdout for the finished 
product, it could have used stdin for the input. Using a serial channel 
does put more burden on the page server to parse the input. But is 
allows it to be on a different machine.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy