[whatwg] Is there any reason for the continued existence of enctype attribute at the form element

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 10/5/09 12:48 PM, Mark Kaplun wrote:
> I have only learned now that there is a "text/palin" 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.

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.

-Boris