Installing the Engine

THE META-HTML LANGUAGE REFERENCE MANUAL

[TOC]

Installing the Engine

The Meta-HTML Engine is the CGI program which actually interprets Meta-HTML statements in your documents.

The Engine gets the path of the page to process from the environment variable PATH_INFO, which is also where it tries to find the value of the current session ID. Thus, a full URL to a page full of Meta-HTML commands stored in your Web documents directory as "foo/bar.mhtml" might look like:

  http://www.your-site.com/cgi-bin/nph-engine/foo/bar.mhtml

and, if a session ID were present in the URL,

  http://www.your-site.com/cgi-bin/nph-engine/73847837482/foo/bar.mhtml

Obviously, this URL is "ugly" in the sense that it is unlikely people browsing your Web site could remember it, or that it is something you would like to publish in a television commercial. So, the goal is to make some reasonable URL, such as http://www.your-site.com/foo/bar.mhtml be the one that your viewers see.

You handle this translation in the configuration files for your server, and the server specific sections of this manual tell you how to do that for many of the popular servers.

For example, let's say that you are building a hairy site for an organization called "Foo Industries." The URL of Foo Industries is http://www.foo.com. The Web administrator for Foo Industries sets up a translation for "/*" to point to "/cgi-bin/mhtml-engine/*".

An URL such as "http://www.foo.com/index.html" causes the Engine to be run, with a PATH_INFO value of "/index.html." The engine reads in and interprets "index.html", and then returns that page.

The Meta-HTML Engine performs various translation on the path that it receives; in effect, it is a small and powerful server on its own.

Prior to executing any page, the file "engine.conf" is executed. Typically, this file is used to set up any globally known page variables, so that references to, for example, SITE-DIRECTORY can be resolved readily within the document pages.