Re: separator default for urlencoded-post versus application/x-www-form-urlencoded

John,

This has always bothered me. My guess is that this was introduced to  
remove the need of escaping "&" to "&" in attributes, but I might  
be wrong.

There is nothing that prevents a server from using ";" instead of "&"  
as the separator for parameters, but the standard today is definitely  
"&" and there is no coming back.

I don't know which applications would use the default value of ";"  
specified by XForms at the moment. This means that there is probably  
not a big risk in changing this default.

-Erik

On Feb 28, 2009, at 10:35 AM, John Boyer wrote:

>
> The section for form-urlencoded submission [1] indicates that it  
> uses the separator character specified by the submission element.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/specs/XForms1.1/index-diff.html#serialize-urlencode
>
> The default for the separator attribute specified at the beginning  
> of Section 11 [2] is semicolon rather than ampersand.
>
> [2] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/specs/XForms1.1/index-diff.html#submit-submission-element
>
> Why is this?
>
> Either the default should be ampersand, or possibly it was meant to  
> be used only on a urlencoded-post?
>
> Or possibly the default was meant to be semi-colon for urlencoded- 
> post and ampersand otherwise?  For method="get" is there ever a  
> reason to have a separator other than ampersand?
>
> This default setting appears ever since the attribute was added way  
> back in 2002 [3], but the attribute appeared in the same working  
> draft as did the urlencoded-post.
>
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xforms-20020821/
>
> John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
> STSM, Interactive Documents and Web 2.0 Applications
> Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
> Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
> IBM Victoria Software Lab
> E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com
>
> Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
> Blog RSS feed: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/rss/JohnBoyer?flavor=rssdw
>

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Received on Saturday, 28 February 2009 18:45:30 UTC