On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Kevin Mukhar wrote:
> "Christopher K. St. John" wrote:
> >
> > Kevin Mukhar wrote:
> >
> > > The only way to know how the parameters were sent by the browser
> > > is to directly read the input stream. (And that assumes the
> > > parameters are sent in the same order as they appear on the
> > > page. Usually a reasonable assumption, but you never know which
> > > browser is going to do something different.)
> >
> > HTML 4.01 Specificationm, 17.13.4 Form content types:
> >
> > 2. The control names/values are listed in the order they
> > appear in the document. The name is separated from the
> > value by `=' and name/value pairs are separated from
> > each other by `&'
> >
> > This has been true since rfc1866 (HTML 2.0). Was there a browser
> > that got this wrong at some point? The spec seems clear that you
> > should be able to depend on the ordering, if you're into that sort
> > of thing.
>
> As usual, the spec holds the answer. No, I have no knowledge of any
> specific browser that does not follow the spec. And I would expect
> that the leading browsers will follow the spec. However, my point
> was that with all the browsers that have been developed over the
> years, if one is developing an application that will be used by the
> general internet public (as opposed to an app that runs on an
> intranet) there is always the possibility that some arbitrary client
> could be using a browser that doesn't follow the spec.
This is true, but I think if you're doing things that should work
according to the spec, you are on pretty safe grounds, unless there is
some common/well-known instances of things not obeying the spec.
That said, the entire scope of the original problem was not specified
completely enough to indicate whether relying on this behavior was
avoidable. It didn't sound like the cleanest design, from what was
said, so maybe it could be redone to avoid relying on this behavior.
Milt Epstein
Research Programmer
Software/Systems Development Group
Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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