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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

There's no publication date and archive.org's earliest snapshot is 2007. For which decade is this advice relevant?

The article is an explanation (defense?) of the author's library Powtils[0], which was created in February 2004[1].

Even in 2004 I think it would have been extremely unusual to write web applications in Pascal and serve them via CGI. The first edition of Lazarus was released in 2001, and the name gives a hint about Pascal's popularity at the time. From what I remember of that era, PHP was dominant and FastCGI was a popular way to hook it up to non-Apache webservers such as IIS.

[0] http://z505.com/powtils/idx.shtml

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040604122859/http://www.psp.fu...

Code was last modified two years ago: https://github.com/z505/powtils

The site's favicon has:

  Last-Modified: Sun, 04 May 2008 00:32:10 GMT

Which means very little, they may have added it long after this page was written.

As this page is rendered with CGI, we don't get a Last-Modified for it. That's a CGI disadvantage :p

EDIT: Oh, http://z505.com/cgi-bin/qkcont/qkcont.cgi?p=PasWiki%20Direct... says "Info on this site dates back to 2004 and may be outdated."! 2004 or earlier then.

It is also unlikely to be running on Windows, as Server 2003 (or perhaps 2008) would not last long connected to the internet.

Windows is also around 100x slower in in forking new processes, so CGI that requires this would not do well.

> As this page is rendered with CGI, we don't get a Last-Modified for it. That's a CGI disadvantage :p

I'm assuming you already know that's false, based on the emoticon, but for anyone else reading... CGI gives you the flexibility to set (or not set) the Last-Modified header as you see fit.

Additionally, CGI is a pretty decent way to give web access to a static site generator. Write or copy your Markdown in a textbox, hit submit, md file is saved, SSG is run, done.

Since it's talking about Perl CGI websites, the decade for which it's relevant was the 1990s.

Phil Greenspun's book Database Backed Websites was published in 1997, and its coverage of CGI already started seeming rather quaint over the next few years as better approaches took over.

Perl was widely used for websites through at least 2005, mod_perl being the dominant expression of it.

It was widely used but also widely criticized by that point. Dead man walking, basically.

With a

  '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">'

it's no earlier than about 1999, when HTML 4.01 came out.

The last big CGI-based web app I did started in 2001. By 2005 (when TurboGears came out) we knew the design was outdated.

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