The reason we are discussing the use of MIME is because we see form
values soon extending to relatively complex media clips (signatures,
files, snapshots, etc. -- some already supported by ViolaWWW, by
the way). SGML is not suitable for that but MIME is.
So if the multipart/www-form overhead for simple fields is too much,
we need some hybrid. Here's a suggestion:
each part in a multipart/www-form is interpreted as a form field
whose name appears in the Content-id, and value is the part's body
of type specified by an optional Content-type UNLESS the content-type
is an ENCTYPE other than multipart/www-form, which is interpreted as
containing additional form name/value pairs.
E.g.,
COntent-type: multipart/www-form
--foo
Content-type: application/www-form-url-encoded
line1=val1&line2=val2&line3=val3
--foo
Content-id: comments
This is supposed to be some long block of text,
e.g. from a TEXTAREA or file inclusion
--foo
Content-id: sig
Content-type: image/xpm
<lots of bits here>
--foo--
(I said that "catch-all" parts should be an ENCTYPE *other than
multipart/www-form* to reserve the use of recursive multipart/www-forms
for hierarchical forms with hiearchical name spaces.)
Jay