Submitting input-form data to server
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 93 01:18:40 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9309050618.AA25895@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: wei@sting.berkeley.edu (Pei Y. Wei)
Cc: TONYJ@scs.slac.stanford.edu, hackers@ora.com, putz@parc.xerox.com,
www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch, ebina@ncsa.uiuc.edu, robm@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: Submitting input-form data to server
In-reply-to: <9309050231.AA06656@sting.Berkeley.EDU>
References: <9309050231.AA06656@sting.Berkeley.EDU>
X-Md4-Signature: c50693a22de80e41b20275ccdd51e645
Status: RO
Pei Y. Wei writes:
> * What syntax do we choose for marking up a property list? SGML or MIME?
How 'bout neither? Forms submit queries; why not stick with the
current query syntax? That is, 'url?query' ... with 'query' looking
something like:
name=value&name=value&name=value
...with the '=' and '&' characters used as reserved characters
(escaped as %xx in any of the name or value strings, as usual).
This is what we're doing in Mosaic 2.0 at the moment; I was within 24
hours of sending out a message to this effect when your note arrived
:-). See
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/fill-out-forms/overview.html
...for details on what we're up to, but note that we're probably going
to change the checkbox handling back closer to what the HTML+
currently says.
> * What information do we return in the property list? Complete text
> (form document + input values), or only the essential user-input values?
Just name=value pairs. Everything else is irrelevant.
> Perhaps MIME would be a better wrapper instead of SGML tags? For example,
> it should be easier for MIME to handle the case where the user enters
> "<VALUE>" for an input. Instead of escaping the content, MIME delimiters
> are variable.
We already have an escaping mechanism for queries; how 'bout we just
use that...
Cheers,
Marc