First, let me begin by saying that it is exactly this sort've muddy thinking combined with blind religiousness and techno self-centeredism with a total disregrad to history and context that has pushed me out of the Perl community entirely.

Regardless of whether or not my code or writting is the best that ever was or the worst that ever was, my pioneering work in Perl CGI brought thousands of people to the community and provided whole careers for hundreds.

You (those of you in the community who are as ignorant as you) should be ashamed and embarrassed that you alienated such an evangelist. I could have been a great ally to Perl CGI.

I am sure you say good riddance, and I say the same to you.

But let me address this post.....

The fact is that you are reading this article COMPLETELY out of context as you are missing all the pages before and after.

A couple of things to note...

1. Fast CGI and mod_perl did not exist at the time of publication. But even if they did, the criticism that I wrote is still valid and an important architectural problem of CGI.

2. Cookies are a different state mechanism covered in a different page of that article. Obviously, you are ignorant, not the article. But regardless, cookies have nothing to do with the CGI standard. They are a supporting technology.

That said, as it so happens, I deplore the use of cookies as a state mechanism and prefer much cleaner models such as those available in J2EE or CGI.

Cookies are one of the slippery slopes that fall from the Model-View-Control peak. With the exception of Presentation logic, I prefer all logic to be in the controller. That you are so keen to suggest JavaScript shows me that your conception of basic design patters is shoddy.

3. As far as the aesthetic blandness I was complaining about with CGI, this is actually a mistake on my part. Actually, at the time, there were several great Flash and VRML sites using MY CGI SCRIPTS and still are today. But the weaknesses of HTML and even dHTML are important issues that the community should help to address rather than deny.

You remind me of LINUX users who try to argue that LINUX has great GUIs. Give me a break! I am a great supporter of LINUX, but hello!!!!!!

4. The entire web is definitely NOT CGIs. CGI is an important part and when used properly, in the right context, is an excellent tool. I have entire books evangelising the use of Perl CGI.

Whatever the case, you need to do a bit of homework yourself before you start flaming.

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