- From: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 12:03:22 -0800
- To: www-forms@w3.org
Micah Dubinko wrote: > > For forms, the main advantage of GET is that it's currently deployed on a > zillion browsers and everyone understands how it works. I'm sure we're in agreement, but I want to make the point that GET had advantages even when it was invented, before there was a legacy issue. GET allows forms to be a user interface to complicated information repositories, like the Google database, Yahoo's personals database, Amazon's book database, etc. Before the web was about e-commerce, it was about exposing database data across organizational boundaries in a standardized way. POST does a poor job of this because the resulting query results cannot be linked. Of course there are all sorts of server-side tricks that you can do to trick the browser into doing a GET after a POST but this is more difficult to code and has some client-side UI problems. >... > clicking the submit control would generate a URI like > http://www.google.com/search?q=foo Does this also work for forms with multiple fields? In particular, I note that HTML forms tend to generate ampersands (yes, there are issues with that choice of character) whereas XForms generate semicolons. I'm all for moving towards semi-colons but shouldn't this be a *choice*? I'd suggest that there needs to be a way to generage "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" in a manner compatible with HTML. There is an open issue about this so I look forward to it resolution. Paul Prescod
Received on Monday, 21 January 2002 15:04:47 UTC