- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:38:51 +0000 (UTC)
On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, Mark Kaplun wrote: > > I have only learned now that there is a "text/plain" option that I have > never heard of, so maybe I'm wrong, but my impression is that there are > only two forms of form, a textual and a file upload. IMHO the browser > can inspect the form before submitting it and decide by itself what is > the correct encoding to use. > > Can the use of this attribute be deprecated, be valid only for backward > compatibility? On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, Boris Zbarsky wrote: > > You can use multipart/form-data with a form that doesn't include any > file uploads (and people do this). Presumably they might have reasons > for this (e.g. they happen to have a sane multipart MIME parsing library > and don't want to deal with the url-encoding mess the > application/x-www-form-urlencoded option produces. On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Mark Kaplun wrote: > > Fair enough. Can the spec be changed in regard to the default encoding, > and make it depend on the content of the form instead of being > application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and then like today, the enctype > attribute can be used to override the default encoding? While I agree that it is probably an authoring error if the author included a type=file control on a page with the default enctype, I don't think the magic of changing the default in that case would help authors on the long run. Consider, for instance, an author who sets up his form with a file upload control, gets everything working, and then decides to remove the file upload control because they don't actually use it, or because it's optional and they want a script to add it dynamically. They might find that suddenly their form doesn't work, but as far as they are concerned all they did was remove a form control that wasn't used in the first place. I think this would be too confusing. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Sunday, 11 October 2009 02:38:51 UTC