On 6/3/11 2:48 PM, Eduard Pascual wrote:
For a typical snippet of client-side form validation, one or two extra
lines of JS can beautify in advance for a GET form.
Why are you assuming there's any client-side validation code involved?
I'm not sure what do you mean by "no one ever sees the actual URI": I
work on a daily basis with half a dozen different browsers, and they
all display the URI wherever I navigate.
The URI is not displayed in the url bar unless the new page is shown.
If the URI results in a file download, it won't be shown in the URL bar.
Another question could be whether they _care_ about the URI.
They don't, of course. But that's not even relevant in the "generate a
download based on form input" case.
By the amount of things it achieves: besides setting the filename
(which I consider only a minor benefit), it improves navigation and
helps SEO (see comments above).
I think you're assuming people care about SEO for the file to be
downloaded.... In many cases they don't.
That's great, and I'm happy you're willing to impose costs on your users so
you don't have to use it. But others may wish to make different tradeoffs
here.
Honestly, if this were coming from someone else, I'd take it as
trolling. But coming from you, I know that's extremely unlikely, so
I'll assume that there has been a misunderstanding at some point,
because that last statement is already taking things too far from
their context. So, please, let me summarize the whole thing, in a
(hopefully) clear way:
1) Most of my sites use some URI beautification techniques to aid both
user's and spider's navigation (with a significant effort to minimize
the impact on the users).
My point was that these techniques, as far as I can tell, impose a cost
on the user, unless I'm completely misunderstanding how they work...
I agree that if you fix up URIs on form submit on client side that cost
is pretty small in the common case.
2) Because of (1), I haven't had any need to ever use the filename
argument on a Content-Disposition header: my beautified URIs already
serve as good enough filenames.
3) Because of (2), I do not hold a strong opinion about how that
argument should be handled on the many different scenarios.
These two were clear, yes.
-Boris