Re: [ietf-types] The application/www-form-urlencoded format

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <[e-mail]>]

* Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>I think it is unfortunate it still allows encoding in various ways. So  
>while things could be more readable as you pointed out in the past user  
>agents are still allowed to obscure most everything.

I do think that encoder implementers can make reasonable choices about
that. If an implementer decides it's best to escape, say, the zero-width
space character because it's invisible then I see nothing wrong with
that. If another implementer decides to not escape it, that's fine too.

>The bug about + seems to be still be there. Escapes are first decoded and  
>then + is replaced with U+0020. Also application/x-www-form-urlencoded is  
>on its way of being standardized as part of HTML5 now.

I don't think there is anything that "HTML5" could standardize about it,
other than define how form submission using that type should be imple-
mented in HTML implementations. As for the +, the text refers to the ab-
stract syntax tree you get when parsing a string using the grammar, so
an escaped plus sign is no instance of `plus`. I take it that's one of
the text's rough edges I should smooth out.

>>       Note: The media type does not have a 'charset' parameter, it
>>       is incorrect specify one and to associate any significance to
>>       it if specified. The character encoding is always UTF-8. The
>>       Unicode encoding form signature is not supported; a leading
>>       U+FEFF character will be considered part of a <name>.
>
>Most other such formats ignore a leading U+FEFF.

I can't think of any format that's always UTF-8 encoded yet allows for
it, but anyway, treating it as part of a name is simpler than ignoring
it, I think people are more likely to implement that correctly than if
I were to require recognizing it.
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