Submitting input-form data to server

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sun, 5 Sep 93 01:18:40 -0500

Pei Y. Wei writes:
> * What syntax do we choose for marking up a property list? SGML or MIME?

How 'bout neither? Furms 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

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? Fur 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