Re: Request bodies alteration and character encoding issue

Thanks for the examples Aaron.

Aaron Kemp wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 7:07 AM, Francois Daoust <fd@w3.org> wrote:
>>  We identified a case where the CT-proxy typically alters request bodies
>>  when it splits forms in multiple pages.
> 
> Right, this is a good one.
> [...]
> 1. The mobile doesn't support multipart/form-data but the page has
> requested this encoding for the form.  In this case, we send a form
> with encoding="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" to the mobile and do
> the transformation before sending the result to the server.
> 
> 2. The mobile doesn't support the character set that the form uses.
> In this case, we convert the content from the mobile's preferred
> character set into whatever the form orginally required.
> 

Looking at this, I just wonder if there's any need to say something like:
"Proxies should not alter request bodies, except:
- blah on form splitting
- blah on form encoding
- blah on ..."

Should we rather use an affirmative form such as "Proxies MAY alter 
request bodies, typically when [above blah]"?
Should we just say nothing?


> 3. Forms that use the GET method are often modified to be POST from
> the mobile for a variety of reasons.

Just to make sure I understand: the form that uses GET is converted to a 
form that uses POST when the HTTP response that contains the form is 
sent to the user. The user thus issues a POST request which is then 
converted back to a GET request by the CT-proxy. In other words, from 
the origin server's point of view, the form still uses GET. Am I right?

That's more than "altering request body". It's "altering request 
method". We may want to add that as well.

Note that my second question would be: could you precise "a variety of 
reasons"? I can think of URI that would become too long, although I 
remember having had this problem six years ago, so I'm not sure it's 
still an issue in practice in 2008.

Received on Tuesday, 18 March 2008 17:09:38 UTC