[Discuss] A Web Server is No Longer a Web Server

[Rich Pieri]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2025 10:32:19 -0500
markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:

> I was going by this:
> https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html
> 
> HTTP and HTML were kind of two parts of the same idea.

Sort of. HTTP and HTML grew up together but they were almost always
separate things. Decoupling content from protocol is one of the
innovations that helped the original WWW project surpass Gopher.

> Dynamic pages, and RPC mechanisms actually have nothing to do with the
> browsers. I'm sure I can find more of the history, but off the top of
> my head I don't have names and dates, someone had the brilliant idea
> of intercepting the "file open" logic of an HTTP server and passing
> that to a spawned process and creating pipe to the standard output
> (The old CGI interface) to produce content.

Oh, that's what you meant. Yeah, this started life as a hack of Apache
and was later formalized. But they're still technically not part of
HTTP. They're bindings to the server providing HTTP. Which is to say,
they're part of the complexity referenced in the original article. :)

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