Missing references/information in HTML 4.0 draft

One of the more obscure CGI questions - "What order are the elements
in a form presented?" - came up, so I went checking the 4.0 draft so I
could provide a reference.  The information isn't there - nor is a
reference to the place where it is. HTML 3.2 isn't quite so bad - it
has a generic reference to RFC 1867, where you find the specification
for multipart/form-data, but no information or reference on
application/x-www-form=-urlencoded is available.

Two suggestions:

1) To make it reasonable to find the specification for UA & CGI developers,
   change the last two sentences describing the ENCTYPE attribute of
   the FORM element from:

     The default value for this attribute is
     "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". The value
     "multipart/form-data" should be used when the returned document
     includes submitted files.

   to

     The default value for this attribute is
     "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" ([RFC1866], Section 8.2.1).
     The value "multipart/form-data" ([RFC1867], Section 7) should be
     used when the returned document includes submitted files.

2) Section 8.2.1 should be extracted from RFC1866 so it can be
   referenced seperately, and should be referenced in the above
   paragraph.

	<mike

Received on Saturday, 2 August 1997 15:11:08 UTC