[whatwg] Form Serialization

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Tue Jan 6 04:07:38 PST 2009


On Wed, 8 Aug 2007, Garrett Smith wrote:
>
> It would be useful to have:
> 
>  HTMLFormElement.prototype.toJSONString
>  HTMLFormElement.prototype.getDataSetString

What are the use cases for this?


On Thu, 9 Aug 2007, Michael A. Puls II wrote:
> 
> Yes, these would be useful for 2 reasons that I can think of.
> 
> 1. *Potential* ease of working around form handling bugs when you
> really need to.
> Although if the form handling is broken, the methods might be too, but
> it still might be easier to get the broken data set and fix it instead
> of generating the data set yourself. At least with getDataString, it
> would show you what's going to be submitted.

Are browsers actually buggy here? Why would we not want the browser 
vendors to just fix those bugs rather than implement new ones?


> 2. Form handling extensions.
> 
> If you want to support the foobambang: protocol, you could use the 
> object and its array values to generate a foobambang:-conforming URI and 
> open it (using the default handler for foobambang URIs).

With the data: URL support, one can now do this using POST to a data: URL, 
per spec (just have the data: page redirect to the appropriate URL). Does 
this handle this case well-enough?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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