Re: Submitting input-form data to server

• Mail folder: WWW Talk Jul-Oct 1993
• Next message: Henning G. Schulzrinne: "Re: Submitting input-form data to server"
• Previous message: Marc Andreessen: "NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0 prerelease 3 available"

Date: Sun, 5 Sep 93 18:49:23 -0700
From: wei@sting.berkeley.edu (Pei Y. Wei)
Message-id: <9309060149.AA07271@sting.Berkeley.EDU>
To: hgs@research.att.com, marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: Submitting input-form data to server
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Status: RO

Marc:
> Henning G. Schulzrinne writes:
> > It would be extremely nice if a set of predefined common attributes
> > could be defined so that you don't have to fill in your name, email
> > address, phone etc. by hand in every single form that comes along.
> > The client would recognize the attributes and supply default values
> > from some local configuration file.
> 
> Somebody want to write a pseudo-spec?  Sounds interesting...

Definitely worthwhile. Now, a question is, should we add another
attribute into the INPUT element to specify the local default-variable? 
Or do we overload the "name" attribute to be both the INPUT identifier
*and* the default variable identifier?

It seems safer if we keep the default-variable identifiers in their own 
name space... So, I'd suggest that another attribute (say, "localvar")
be added into the INPUT element. (more HTML+ tweaking!)

This way, you'd say ``<INPUT name="org" localvar="ORGANIZATION">'',
and the local default value could (on Unix) easily get picked up from 
the environment variable "ORGANIZATION".


-Pei                                    Pei Y. Wei
                                        Digital Media Group
                                        O'Reilly & Associates