Re: Submission of high-value characters from an XFORMS form

>From: "Chris Haynes" <chris@harvington.org.uk>
>To: <www-forms@w3.org>
>Subject: Submission of high-value characters from an XFORMS form
>

IŽm just a reader in this list, but from my understanding of XML IŽll 
address your questions.

>If you insert a character with value > 0xFF it appears to be masked
>with 0xFF, i.e. only the 8 least significant bits are transmitted.
>There appears to be no attempt at anything like Unicode encoding.
>
>My questions to the XFORMS community:
>
>(1)  Is there anything in the XFORMS specification which says that
>characters with values > 0xFF  must be capable of being submitted?

Yes, implied: Instance Data is XML in XForms so it is capable of conveying 
every Unicode character, but support for many encodings is up to the 
implementors (UTF-8 is mandatory I think, but if you have many high-value 
characters in your data, UTF-16 would be more efficient).

>(2) If (1)==true: Does that require changes in HTTP?

No. HTTP is just one of the possible transports, but probably the limitation 
youŽve found, is for verb GET, where you pass back data in the query string. 
For POST you can pass any data.

>(3) If (2)==true: How are current XFORMS pilots etc. working?

Some implementations, are server-based pre/post-processors so they are 
limited by browsers capabilities. Others have full XML capability, so no 
problem. My previous efforts, not XForms related, used IE-specific XML and 
scripting features to achieve full data transparency.

>(4) If (2)== false: How is the submitted data encoded? Where is it
>specified?

Data is , as I said, XML, so it can be encoded in UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, UTF-16, 
and so on. The protocol may impose some further encoding, but I think that 
besides plain HTTP, something is being worked out by the WG.


Rafael Teixeira
Brazilian Developer


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Received on Wednesday, 2 January 2002 06:08:59 UTC