Forms output URLs with &

It looks like Amaya 3.0 outputs "&" as a form parameter separator.  It 
should use ";".

To see for yourself, try this chunk of HTML in Amaya:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<FORM METHOD="GET" ACTION="http://www.w3.org/">
Cheezy:
<INPUT CHECKED TYPE="checkbox" NAME="cheezy">
Creamy:
<INPUT CHECKED TYPE="checkbox" NAME="creamy">
<INPUT TYPE="submit">
</FORM>
</body>
</html>

Hit submit.  Note the resulting URL:
http://www.w3.org/?cheezy=on&creamy=on

Netscape, IE, and Amaya generate URLs with an ampersand form field
delimiter, and every CGI library that I know of uses ampersand as the
preferred delimiter.

However, the HTML 4.0 spec says that semicolon is the way to do this:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#form-content-type
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html#ampersands-in-uris

Someone needs to take the lead here and implement semicolon as the 
preferred separator.  It seems that Amaya, being a W3C reference 
implementation, is the best candidate.  That will hopefully, in turn, cause 
the CGI libraries out there to start implementing semicolon as an alternate 
separator.

Thoughts?
Rob

Received on Thursday, 6 April 2000 22:31:01 UTC