[Xitami] Xitami, ActivePerl CGI Scripts Not Working

[Brian {Hamilton Kelly}]

[Following up to a long-dead thread, because (SFAICS) no one bothered to
explain what Patricko had been seeing]

[Also re-ordering the posts so as to provide meaningful chronological
context to question and answer]

In message <017501c2623e$4260cdd0$5fab4044@PATRICKO> "Patricko" writes:

> "Peter van der Goes" <pvdg@worldnet.att.net> wrote on
> Sunday, September 22, 2002 6:24 AM:
> > 
> > 
> > > Please tell me what 3D stuff you are referring to?
> > >
>
> This is what is showing in the Xitmai archives
> 
> <html>
> <head>
>  <title>Animal</title>
> </head>
> <body>
> <form action=3D"animal.cgi" METHOD=3DPOST>
> Which animal? <INPUT type=3D"text" name=3D"animal">
> <P><INPUT type=3D"submit">

[snip further examples of the occurrence of "3D"]

The above stems from someone having used "quoted-printable" format when
making a posting, and for the archiving software being ignorant of this
format, and including the content verbatim.

Quoted-printable is sometimes used by some mailers when a character is
required in the text that is not "seven-bit clean" (the relevant
standards for e-mail on the Internet explicitly state that the content of
messages shall consist ONLY of the characters in the SEVEN-bit ASCII
character set, although extensions exist to handle, e.g., characters with
the eighth bit set high).  One of these extension mechanisms is the very
crude quoted-printable format; use of this format is generally
deprecated.

So such characters are sent by their equivalent hexadecimal code for the
two nibbles in the octet, preceded by an equals sign.  Thus the code for
the British "pound sign" might appear as =A3, since this character has
the code 0xA3 (or 163 in decimal)[1].  Since the equals character is
hijacked under this mechanism to introduce such triglyph codes for a
single character, then occurrences of the equals sign itself will appear
encoded, as =3D, since 0x3d or decimal 61 is the ASCII code for the
equals sign.  (Messages in quoted-printable will sometimes also have =20
appearing at the ends of lines, to indicate that there is actually a
space character present there before the end-of-line.)

You'll note that this mail does NOT have the requisite MIME header to
indicate that quoted-printable characters appear herein, and therefore
everyone's mail-readers /ought/ to see the actual triglyph sequences
themselves, rather than the character which each sequence represents.

[1] Well, that's the code in a widely-used codepage associated with
Windows Latin-1 alphabet.  For those of us that use CP437 or CP850, we
see a lowercase-letter-u-with-acute-accent, but that's just another of
the vagaries of Windows software assuming that everyone is using it, and
not including the other requisite headers to permit of automatic
translation at the recipent's computer.
-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                          bhk@dsl.co.uk
    "We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of
    distributed ignorance.  And we know and understand less while being incr-
    easingly capable."              Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs