RE: GET should be encouraged, not deprecated, in XForms [was: Issue request for the TAG: XForms]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@prescod.net]
>
> "David E. Cleary" wrote:
> >
> > How do you use GET to send an XML document to a server? Where does the
> > content-type text/xml go? As per W3C, moved thread to www-forms.
>
> If you want to submit XML, you shouldn't use GET. XForms already has
> support for submitting other than XML.

The only serialization that has any chance of working with GET is also
listed as deprecated, and that too, may cause problems with legacy servers
due to the encoding techniques used to generate a hierarchy.

Also, the semantics of GET as defined by HTTP do not fit in with a client
submitting a form. While GET has certainly been overloaded to work as a form
submission method in today's world, that seems like a mistake to me. POST
has the correct semantics and specifically lists submitting forms in the
specification.

Finally, are there servers out there urlencoded data differently based on
whether is was received via GET or POST? Most make no distinction on this,
and the same code will work whether the form was submitted by using POST
instead of GET.

XForms is not about submitting name/value pairs. It is about submitting XML.
While we added support for legacy servers, that was meant to be temporary.
If deprecating GET and urlencoded data is a problem, I would support
removing them entirely instead of making them something XForms must support
moving forward.

David Cleary
the Progress Company

Received on Wednesday, 23 January 2002 14:43:32 UTC