The only downside of CGI that I know about is the fact it starts a new process to handle each user request. When you're saying it's preferable to serverside we

The only downside of CGI that I know about is the fact it starts a new process to handle each user request. When you're saying it's preferable to serverside web frameworks you probably ought to point out that it does far less for you. I started out in web dev working on Perl CGI scripts and they were great (once you got your FTP app to use the right CRLF encoding), but you really had to do everything yourself. Some devs might see that as a benefit but I don't.