Brainstorming: more structured form submissions

An issue I have often come up against is wanting to provide an editable grid
for form submission. The current model of a name and value pair submission
can be problematic in this situation.

To work around this currently it is common to prefix or suffix a row
identifier to the names of controls with a "row".

I propose that we introduce new enctype value(s) and updated guidance on
user agent processing of form data and name attributes. The goal of this is
to provide support for submission of more structured form data, e.g. in XML
or even JSON notation for example.

I've attached an example of a form that would submit an XML document
describing the form data within the POST HTTP request body and also the
submitted XML document.

The concept underlying this example is that the target XML structure could
be derived from the HTML DOM structure of the form itself. This is not just
limited to table rows as in this example, but could also be fieldsets and
other structural elements as well.

-- 
Ben Meadowcroft
http://www.benmeadowcroft.com/

Received on Friday, 30 March 2007 02:48:55 UTC