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

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 10/12/09 11:32 AM, Mark Kaplun wrote:
> Is there any reason why someone will do such a thing by design? unless
> there is some exotic reason, this is an example to a form which do not
> perform its role.

That depends on whether the server actually expects to get anything from 
the file input.

> In any case the doctype for this kind of old pages
> will not be html 5

Why does that matter?  The point is that browser behavior will NOT 
depend on the doctype but rather HTML5 will be backwards compatible with 
existing behavior.

> This is kind of an egg and a chicken problem. Currently the standards
> specifies the "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" mime as default, and
> if the standard remains the same the UA will not be able to change their
> behavior.

The UA can't change behavior not because of the standard but because of 
existing content that might be relying on that behavior.  If it's shown 
there is no such content, then changing is easy: you just change UAs and 
the standard, in any desired order.

-Boris