[ale] CGI and Earthlink hosting

[Ben Coleman]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2002 12:42:44 -0500, David S. Jackson wrote:

>I'm trying to create a cgi perl script on an earthlink host.  I'm
>not sure if they even support CGI.pm, or if so, to what extent.
>I've asked several times via email, and they don't respond to
>mod_perl or CGI.pm questions.

I haven't looked at this since before the Earthlink/Mindspring merger,
but last I knew, they won't do CGI debugging support.

>The scripts seem to work fine on my boxes.

To tell you the truth, that puzzles me, as your code for start_html
doesn't seem to match the documented interface, at least on the version
of CGI that comes with Perl 5.6.1(see perldoc CGI.pm, the section
titled 'CREATING THE HTML DOCUMENT HEADER').  You might want to check
what versions of Perl and CGI.pm are running on the host site, and
compare with what's running on your own boxes.  E.g.:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);

print header(), start_html(-title => 'Versions');
print h1('Perl Version'), $];
print h1('CGI Version'), $CGI::VERSION;
print end_html;


>*************  I generate this with:  *************
>
>#!/usr/local/bin/perl -wT
>
>use Carp;
>use CGI qw(:standard *table );
>
>use strict;
>
>my $baseurl = 'http://www.dsj.net';
>
>print header(), title("DSJ Networks"),

The title really should be part of start_html.

>start_html({bgcolor=>"white"}, {text=>"#000000"},
>{Link=>"#0000ff"}, {vlink=>"#551a8b"}, {alink=>"#ff0000"});

As I said before, this doesn't match the documented interface.  It
should be more like

start_html(-title => 'DSJ Networks', -bgcolor -> 'white', -text =>
'#ff0000',
-link => '#0000ff', -vlink => '#551a8b', -alink => '#ff0000');

or possibly

start_html({title => 'DSJ Networks', bgcolor=>"white", text=>"#000000",
Link=>"#0000ff", vlink=>"#551a8b", alink=>"#ff0000"});

depending on the version of CGI.pm in use.  The latter works on the
CGI.pm that comes with Perl 5.6.1, but it appears that the version on
Earthlink is an older version that interprets the hash references
you're passing to start_html as the old positional notation.

Ben

-- 
Ben Coleman oloryn at benshome.net      | The attempt to legislatively
http://oloryn.home.mindspring.com/   | micromanage equality results, at
Amateur Radio NJ8J                   | best, in equal misery for all.



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