Re: lynx-dev file uploads in forms

[rjp]

In message <address@hidden>, 
           Klaus Weide writes:
> Well, if it used "quoted-printable" instead of "base64" it would work
> in more situations.  If it used a C-T-E only when necessary (8-bit chars
> present), it would work in more situations.

Good points.  Only using C-T-E where necessary is more difficult.  The code
is designed to only open the file once and only have one copy in memory at
the very last point possible (to avoid copying big files around in memory).

The problem is that find some 8-bit chars in the last 10 bytes of a 1 Meg
file would mean scrapping all the work we'd done up to that point.  Oh, for
multipart/form-data byte-ranges!  So, I guess we have to scan the whole file
first, for 8-bit chars, then only use C-T-E if necessary.

It would have to be an option, though, because I haven't seen many form
uploads that actually handle C-T-E at all.  I'll have a look at the spec
for multipart/form-data some more -- I've a vague memory that you can
specify what kind of data you can accept.  If it can accept C-T-E'd data,
Lynx can be good and 7bit clean.  If it can't, Lynx will just have to
transfer binary, like the broken browsers.

And I'll get around to patching CGI.pm and sending it off to Lincoln Stein.

> Newer, or older?  It seems at some point there already was a non-encoding
> version, which got replaced by the unconditional base64 code.  But I
> haven't followed closely.

The non-encoding is version 0.2, the unconditional base64 was version 0.1.
v0.1 works all the time, whereas v0.2 has some issues with the position of
the file upload field on the form (to do with mishandling first_one which
leads to the the boundary strings being misplaced).

> And there I thought that kind of stuff was there to make it *simpler*...

Ah, no, unfortunately, ASP/vbscript has no facility for handling
multipart/form-data that I can find.  You either have to use MS's "Posting
Acceptor" or pay big bucks for one written by someone else.  I took secret
option #3, and wrote my own handler in vbscript.  It is *not* fun.
-- 
rob partington % address@hidden % http://lynx.browser.org/