Appendix B. Alternatives

There are numerous alternative ways in which form data can be encoded; many are listed in Section 5.2 of [RFC2388]. The multipart/form-data encoding is verbose, especially if there are many fields with short values. In most use cases, this overhead isn't significant.

More problematic are the differences introduced when implementors opted to not follow [RFC2388] when encoding non-ASCII field names (perhaps because "may" should have been "MUST"). As a result, parsers need to be more complex for matching against the possible outputs of various encoding methods.