> that would alienate some people:
>
> hidden fields are awkward at best
>
> "overloaded paths" in the URL are bad
>
> Recommend putting state information and other optional
> parameters after a (yet to be implemented on some servers)
> semi-colon ";" and before the question mark "?".
This suggestion is not viable as a general solution, due to the
limitations of HTML/SGML. URLs are effectively limited to 1024
characters by the HTML 2.0 DTD. This just doesn't leave enough room
for the state of many interesting applications. Of course, field
values are also limited in this way. But you can have as many hidden
fields as you like.
Hidden fields awkward? I disagree. It is very convenient to have
all the state of the server program transported in exactly the same
way, whether or not it happens to be directly manipulable by the user
at that point in the interaction. It's a flexible, general
mechanism.
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Paul Burchard <burchard@geom.umn.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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