Perl and robots

How do robot deal with html served by perl

[Uzil]

Hello everybody
I do not know is my question is in the right forum but here it is.
Do robots index the html content of a page when this page is generated by a perl script?
And do also robots follow links like:
http://example.com/cgi-bin/my-script.cgi?var=this&vars=that
?

[edited by: encyclo at 6:03 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2006]
[edit reason] switched to example.com [/edit]

[perl_diver]

robots can be programmed to work differently, so some robots might index script generated pages and follow links and some might not.

[phranque]

i would assume that a well-behaved robot would try to do a HTTP "GET" on the href value of every anchor tag.

[crevier]

Robots can indeed behave differently for different URL patterns. But you can write your content so that there's no way for the requesting agent to have any idea how it was generated. I've developed many sites where all content is generated by perl scripts. But every URL is a directory URL (/blue/, /red/, etc). There is no ".html", no ".cgi", etc. This hides the underlying technology, which the agent doesn't need to be concerned about anyway. Could be Perl CGI, could be PHP, could be a flat HTML file. You don't need to know.

A simple example is if you use server-side includes for dynamic content. Your included script can display today's date, file contents, etc. But there's no way for the requesting agent to know that this happened.

Here's a good article written by Tim Berners-Lee many years ago about this topic: [w3.org...]