[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 methods and enctypes

[Robert Sayre]

Ben Meadowcroft wrote:

>>On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 14:28:19 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson 
>><ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>>Would it also be possible that the Web Forms 2.0 specification 
>>>>allowed additional '@enctype' values, like 'application/atom+xml'?
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>If the Atom spec specifies how to convert a Web Forms 2.0 form data 
>>>set into an 'application/atom+xml' encoded form data set, 
>>>      
>>>
>>then UAs can 
>>    
>>
>>>implement it.
>>>
>
>Transforming WF2 data to atom would be a mapping that would be best
>defined by the form author surely? Perhaps one way to do this would be to
>allow a form submitting x-www-form-xml encoded data to be transformed
>using XSLT on the data, this could be done on the server or it could be
>done on the client, e.g.
>
><form
>	action="http://example.com/atom.endpoint"
>      enctype="application/x-www-form+xml"
>	target-enctype="application/atom+xml"
>	transformation="http://example.com/atom.transform.wf2"
>      method="post">
>
>This would then provide an extensible mechanism for advanced uses of XML
>submission in a variety of domain specific XML languages such as atom.
>  
>

Although this proposal is an interesting general solution, I think UAs 
would also have to implement the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) [1] to 
do anything useful with Atom representations in a standardized fashion. 
APP is not based on RPC-over-HTTP, like other blogging protocols, but it 
requires a bit more HTTP choreography than is present in the WF2 model. 
That mismatch makes it difficult for me to see how a browser would be 
useful as a general APP client in the absence of WAML and/or XMLHTTP 
features.

Robert Sayre

[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-00.txt