André Warnier wrote:
"application/x-www-form-urlencoded" is the default, and it means that
you are passing the form data appended at the end of the URL, preceded
by a "?" sign, as one long string of the form
"name1=value1&name2=value2..." etc..
usually known as "the query string".
That is easy to do, but has the inconvenient that the server does not
really know in which character set these things are. This can play
havoc with internationally-minded applications.
It can also have the result that the request may be truncated after a
certain maximum length, by some intervening actor.
Sorry, I have to throw a little exception there.... the char set for
URL-encoded get/post data is defined in
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.3 as the value of
the form element's accept-charset attribute, which defaults to
"UNKNOWN", and "User agents may interpret this value as the character
encoding that was used to transmit the document containing this FORM
element.". We rely on this in a system used on hundreds of sites in
various countries for several years, and we have found no exceptions.
Other that that, I hope our less experienced readers take note of your
excellent advice.
cheers
John
