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

Boris Zbarsky bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Mon Oct 12 07:46:03 PDT 2009


On 10/11/09 11:06 AM, Mark Kaplun wrote:
> Boris, I have agreed with your first response that I don't know enough
> about all the crazy things that people might be doing, to make this
> attribute to disappear. However I don't see how changing the default
> mime type will have any affect on the existing web pages

It'll change how existing web pages with file controls (whether visible 
or not) and no enctype set are submitted, right?

> IMHO this attribute is a bug in the specification which is causing
> annoyance to any web developer which do not use IDE's to create forms.
> Changing the default the way I described might create a different
> annoyance, but in my opinion it will be a much lesser one.

My point is that changing the default might not be possible in UAs 
without causing compat issues with existing pages.  It might work, it 
might not.  It'd be a big risk for whichever UA tries it first.

-Boris



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