lynx-dev TEXTAREA and INPUT TYPE="file" common problem

[Klaus Weide]

On Sat, 13 Feb 1999, David H wrote:

> On a different topic, though:  Does all of the work with the TEXTAREA
> editing in any way make HTTP File Upload (<INPUT TYPE="file">) more
> likely to be implemented?

There is a basic problem at a lower level with this.  Lynx isn't prepared
to deal well with submitting large amounts of data.  Form contents are
treated like part of the address of a document, either literally (for GET
forms, part of the URL after '?') or effectively: the pair of (URL,
post_data) is practically used like an address to pass things around
between functions, look up documents in lists and hash tables and so on.
That means that there are probably several copies of the post_data around
in memory - not good if that is the contents of a huge file.

It would be interesting to test the textarea code with a huge file and
see how much memory usage grows.

     Klaus