Re: forms question

Rick Troth (troth@rice.edu)
Mon, 22 Aug 1994 11:46:58 -0500 (CDT)

I can't express this strongly enough without using wording
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 "?".

Here's a real-life example:

http://vm.rice.edu/local/problem,read?number=20186

(substitute semi-colon for the comma)

The token "read" is bit of state information passed from
one page to the next. The page that gives me this URL is a "list".
We also have a "post" operation. There's no reason why these
parameters can't be of the form statevar=somevalue. As long as they
fall *before* that blessed question mark, your clients will cope.
Using semi-colon or even comma sure beats the confusion of another slash.

I tried implementing this will hidden fields and everyone puked. 

-- 
Rick Troth <troth@rice.edu>, Rice University, Information Systems