Re: LYNX-DEV Chartrans - forms

[Klaus Weide]

On Sun, 2 Mar 1997, Hynek Med wrote:

> Klaus, I have one more idea for you - how are the forms data translated? 
> I recall using your old patches against a traceroute gateway, and the
> added charset parameter to content-type has puzzled the script so it
> didn't produce any results.. 

If you can reproduce that, please give the URL and what settings for
character set and raw you were using.  And make sure that the thing
works without the chartrans code, if you have another version of
Lynx around.

I didn't change anything in the code that appends "; charset=".. for
POSTed form submissions.  (But I probably should.)  Some of the assumptions
made in that code (see comment in GridText.c) are wrong now, but
"charset=" will still only be sent back if the document containing the
form had an explicitly given charset.  (In that case though, the charset
sent back may not always be correct now...)  So I don't understand how
the curent chartrans code could lead to the failure you describe -
a server (or CGI form) which deals out charset= parameters should be able 
to also understand them.  

> Maybe it's a better idea to translate the
> data for the forms to the character set of the document with the form? 

That's a nice idea.  Finally it should probably be done.
The nice idea becomes less nice when you consider that
- we may not know the document charset (but have only "assumed" it)
- we may not be able to translate back, or translate not all characters

And of course documents should contain the ACCEPT-CHARSET attribute on
input form fields, as in RFC2070...

> PS It's nice to see extra HTML entites like č beeing added..

Yes, it might be nice.  Go ahead, Hynek, add more of them!
The place to add them is in HTMLDTD.c, you don't need to understand C,
youst follow the examples (search for "ccaron"...) and add entities
in alphabetic (ASCII) order.  Of course you need to know the Unicode
values those entities stand for...

   Klaus  

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