Re: field "METHOD" in "<FORM>"

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Mon, 25 Oct 1993 10:42:20 -0500

> I want to update a database, and to do it I need a new field "METHOD" in
> the tag "<FORM>". Example :
> - <FORM METHOD="DELETE" ACTION="table name"> to delete a row
How about:
<FORM ACTION="http://server/database">
<SELECT NAME="action"><OPTION>update<OPTION>create<OPTION>delete</SELECT>
...
We should strive for a design where the method is implicit in the users
actions (e.g., when selecting a hypertext the GET method is implicit,
however shift-right_button might imply HEAD instead) and not hardcoded in
the link.

This (a database interface) does bring up another issue. Let's say I have
a database where one of the elements is a large piece of text (e.g., a
bug report). You cannot currently represent this with forms. Why?
Because when you try and put the "VALUE" in <INPUT SIZE="64,30"
VALUE="...50K of text..."> I'll bet just about every parser we have is
going to break. The "easy" way around this is to define a new input tag
that is a container
<h2>Bug report contents</h2>
<TXTIN SIZE="64,30">
default text in container
</TXTIN>
I'll leave it to the SGML folks to solve this problem (which I believe
is important). Attributes in SGML are next to useless. Note that you
could it like this:
<INPUT><VALUE>...</VALUE><LABEL>press here</LABEL></INPUT>
That way, browsers that don't understand INPUT would still show
the textual content and get an idea about what was going on.

--sanders