[CLUE-Tech] Strange URLs in a ColdFusion Site

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 01 Apr 2004 15:40:26 -0700
David Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:

> TWiki does this too:
> 
> http://myhost/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/WebHome
> 
> The "view" is the cgi script name, TWiki is the web name, and WebHome is
> 
> the topic name.
> 
> I haven't looked at it much except that the path before the script name 
> is a script alias in Apache.

I figured there was some requisite server-side configuration to be done in
order for this to work. I was thinking more along the lines of a
mod_rewrite, though. Well, actually something that works sorta like
mod_rewrite to munge things into something that can be dealt with on the
server side.

I think it likely keeps working, as long as all URLs are absolute. The
SSRN site uses relative URLs, and so a browser would get confused, unless
it has some notion of "well-known" server-side script names. Or maybe
there's some other fiddling that works. It just occurs to me that a BASE
meta-tag might be part of it. But if IE (for example) is "recognizing" the
technique by some regex method, or whatnot, then what happens if I decide
to become devious, and set up a directory in my web tree called "foo.php"?

I have to wonder, too, at the motivation for messing with the well-known
standard way of structuring URLs. Maybe somebody thinks that makes it
harder on CGI hacks? Surely that can't be it, as such is just easily
munged for cracking.

jed
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... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
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