Speaking of CHECKIN/CHECKOUT, there is a huge space of applications
that would be enabled if the popular web browsers had some way of
grabbing a local file and POSTing it to a server.
Related to this, I think it would be a good idea for browsers to support
POSTing of attributes contained in the same anchor. This would avoid
passing arbitrarily long command lines to cgi scripts which is unsafe
as well as hard to read. I've suggested this a couple times before
in newsgroups., but it didn't catch on, so I try again as a followup to
your idea.
That is, the <A> tag in my version can take a method=POST
attribute ala the <FORM> tag. The semantics of this is that the
browser is supposed to determine an appropriate body and POST it
to the HREF instead of doing a GET. My version gets the body by
popping up a file-system-browsing dialog box, and reading the
selected file.
My idea is that with method=POST in an anchor, all the other attributes
of the anchor would be passed to the cgi script as standard input, just
as if it were the action of a FORM. This would be useful when a
generated html document encodes information in the document that
should be passed back to the server when the anchor is selected. This
can be done now using extra path and query string options, as well as
command line arguments, but again, this can be unsafe and hard to read.
To support both your idea and mine, there would have to be some
additional option to select between input from a file and input from
the attributes.
Dan LaLiberte
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu
(Fight interface copyrights and software patents.
Join the League for Programming Freedom: lpf@uunet.uu.net)