[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 methods and enctypes

[Asbjørn Ulsberg]

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 21:20:56 +0100, Ben Meadowcroft  
<ben at benmeadowcroft.com> wrote:

> Transforming WF2 data to atom would be a mapping that would be best
> defined by the form author surely?

Yes, probably. But the author of the form and the form's ACTION script  
might not always be the same. Either, the form author is posting it to  
someone else's CGI script or something, or the form author has just copied  
some standard Atom CGI library to his site to make it Atom-enabled, and  
doesn't know anything about CGI herself.

Therefore, it would be great if the mapping weren't server-dependent, but  
could be done on the client so that the server implementation could always  
just accept POST, PUT, DELETE and the proper MIME type, no matter where  
the request came from.

> 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

I would prefer if this was possible to do on the client, so that server  
implementations could be kept as general and simple as possible.

> <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">

That's something I could live with. Is it possible for WF2 to support  
something like this?

> This would then provide an extensible mechanism for advanced uses of XML
> submission in a variety of domain specific XML languages such as atom.

Yes; Atom is not alone in this field, I presume. The Atom API even  
supports other MIME types to be posted, and extending WF2 this way could  
even make simple web forms be WebDAV clients, PUT-ing WebDAV resources all  
over the server. :-)

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg         -=|=-        asbjornu at hotmail.com
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»