Re: [ietf-types] Registration for application/x-www-form-urlencoded

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

Hi Michael,

On 07/08/2012, at 6:36 AM, Michael[tm] Smith <[e-mail]> wrote:

> This is a request to register the application/x-www-form-urlencoded media
> type by reference to the HTML5 specification:
> 
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/iana.html#application-x-www-form-urlencoded
> 
[…]
> Interoperability considerations:
>  Rules for generating and processing application/x-www-form-urlencoded
>  payloads are defined in the HTML5 specification.

HTML4 encouraged <http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/appendix/notes.html#h-B.2.2> the use of a semi-colon as a delimiter  in some uses of this type. AFAICT, HTML5 doesn't say anything about it.

A number of libraries (e.g., Python's urlparse.parse_qs) do treat a semicolon as a delimiter, based upon this advice. IME this has led to interop problems, as some software thinks it's data, while other software thinks it's a delimiter.

It would be good if this could be clarified; e.g., a note to the effect that semicolon is NOT a delimiter, even though it was encouraged in the past (that makes filing appropriate bugs easier).

That could be done here, or somewhere else in the HTML5 spec.

Cheers,


--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/