<section id="cgi">
<title>CGI environment variables</title>
- <p>The CGI specification (<rfc section="4.1">3875</rfc>) defines a number of environment
- variables that expand on those defined by the HTTP spec.
- These have been adopted more broadly, and are a standard
+ <p>The CGI specification (<rfc section="4.1">3875</rfc>) defines a
+ number of meta-variables, many of which derive their values from
+ HTTP request headers. Apache httpd makes these available as
+ environment variables to CGI scripts and other request-processing
+ mechanisms. These have been adopted more broadly, and are a standard
part of passing information between the browser and the
server, and between processes on the server side. Here we
discuss a few of these. For the complete list of request