HTML form data | |
---|---|
Internet media type | application/x-www-form-urlencoded |
File formats category - |
When data that has been entered into HTML forms is submitted, the form field names and values are encoded and sent to the server in an HTTP request message using method GET or POST, or, historically, via email. (User-agent support for email based HTML form submission, using a 'mailto' URL as the form action, was proposed in RFC 1867 section 5.6, during the HTML 3.2 era. Various web browsers implemented it by invoking a separate email program or using their own rudimentary SMTP capabilities. Although sometimes unreliable, it was briefly popular as a simple way to transmit form data without involving a web server or CGI scripts.) The encoding used by default is based on a very early version of the general URI percent-encoding rules, with a number of modifications such as newline normalization and replacing spaces with "+
" instead of "%20
". The Internet data type of data encoded this way is application/x-www-form-urlencoded
, and it is currently defined (still in a very outdated manner) in the HTML and XForms specifications. In addition, the CGI specification contains rules for how web servers decode data of this type and make it available to applications.
When sent in an HTTP GET request, application/x-www-form-urlencoded data is included in the query component of the request URI. When sent in an HTTP POST request or via email, the data is placed in the body of the message, and the name of the media type is included in the message's Content-Type header.
See also[]
- percent-encoding
- Online HTML viewer with HTML Editor