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

[Ian Hickson <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2010, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Ian Hickson wrote:
> >> >After having thought about it some more I am doubting this would be a very  
> >> >useful addition though. The benefit over application/x-www-form-urlencoded  
> >> >seems marginal. Not high enough to warrant the cost.
> >> 
> >> My interest is in having a proper reference for the format for use in
> >> other protocols, where application/x-www-form-urlencoded already works
> >> supporting application/www-form-urlencoded is indeed not very important.
> >
> >May I suggest using a different name in that case? Having two so similarly 
> >named types in active use would be quite confusing.
> 
> The names are as different as the formats are, if I changed the name to,
> say, application/name-value-pairs, then there would probably be someone
> saying it's confusing to have so different names even though the actual
> differences in the format are trivial if not almost meaningless in prac-
> tise. So long as I lack a convincing argument to counter that I'll stick
> with the current name.

The problem is that since they aren't compatible, yet have so similar 
names, it's quite likely that people will get the names wrong and end up 
with interoperability problems. This would be _especially_ confusing if 
any software ends up implementing both.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'