3. Advice for Forms and Form Processing

3. Advice for Forms and Form Processing

The representation and interpretation of forms and the nature of form processing is not specified by this document. However, for forms and form processing that result in the generation of multipart/form-data, some suggestions are included.

In a form, there is generally a sequence of fields, where each field is expected to be supplied with a value, e.g., by a user who fills out the form. Each field has a name. After a form has been filled out and the form's data is "submitted", the form processing results in a set of values for each field -- the "form data".

In forms that work with multipart/form-data, field names could be arbitrary Unicode strings; however, restricting field names to ASCII will help avoid some interoperability issues (see Section 5.1).

Within a given form, ensuring field names are unique is also helpful. Some fields may have default values or presupplied values in the form itself. Fields with presupplied values might be hidden or invisible; this allows using generic processing for form data from a variety of actual forms.