Re: Submitting input-form data to server

Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>

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From: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Message-id: <9309091009.AA23263@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re: Submitting input-form data to server
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 93 11:09:25 BST
Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.36.1.1]
Status: RO

Pei Wei raises the issue of how to transfer forms data between clients
and servers. I posted one approach some time ago for doing this within
the existing URL spec for search strings.

This makes use of the permitted special characters in search strings to
delimit attribute/value pairs:

        FormData ::=    name@value [! FormData]

Multivalued attributes are represented by several such name@value pairs
(one pair per <input> element on the form).

If space, @ or ! occurs in the name or value then each occurence should be
escaped with %20 %25 or %21 respectively following the normal convention of a
% followed by the hexadecimal code of the respective character. It is perhaps
advisable to avoid such characters in the attribute name itself.

An alternative approach based on mail-type headers could work as:

        AttributeValue: name value

This header is repeated as necessary for each field in the form.


What do you think?

Dave Raggett