Editing Common Gateway Interface (section)

== History ==

In 1993, the [[National Center for Supercomputing Applications]] (NCSA) team wrote the specification for calling command line executables on the www-talk mailing list.<ref>{{cite mailing list |url=http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q4/0485.html |title=Server Scripts |mailing-list=www-talk |date=1993-11-14 |last=McCool |first=Rob |author-link= Robert McCool |df=mdy |access-date=2019-05-15}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=The Common Gateway Interface |url=http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/ |website=hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu |publisher=National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100127161358/http://hoohoo.ncsa.illinois.edu/cgi/ |archive-date=2010-01-27}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=CGI: Common Gateway Interface |url=http://www.w3.org/CGI/ |website=w3.org |publisher=World Wide Web Consortium |df=mdy |access-date=2019-05-15 |archive-date=19 December 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091219062131/http://www.w3.org/CGI/ |url-status=live }}</ref> The other Web server developers adopted it, and it has been a standard for Web servers ever since. A work group chaired by [[Ken Coar]] started in November 1997 to get the NCSA definition of CGI more formally defined.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://ken.coar.org/cgi/ |title=Common Gateway Interface RFC Project Page |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130825202222/http://ken.coar.org/cgi/ |archive-date=2013-08-25}}</ref> This work resulted in RFC 3875, which specified CGI Version 1.1. Specifically mentioned in the RFC are the following contributors:<ref name="rfc3875"/>

* [[Rob McCool]] (author of the [[NCSA HTTPd]] Web server)
* John Franks (author of the GN Web server)
* [[Ari Luotonen]] (the developer of the [[CERN httpd]] Web server)
* Tony Sanders (author of the Plexus Web server)
* George Phillips (Web server maintainer at the University of British Columbia)

Historically CGI programs were often written using the [[C programming language]]. RFC 3875 "The Common Gateway Interface (CGI)" partially defines CGI using C,<ref name="rfc3875"/> in saying that environment variables "are accessed by the [[C library]] routine getenv() or variable environ".

The name CGI comes from the early days of the Web, where ''[[webmaster]]s'' wanted to connect legacy information systems such as databases to their Web servers. The CGI program was executed by the server and provided a common [[Gateway (telecommunications)|"gateway"]] between the Web server and the legacy information system.