DALI section 4 lists a number of parameters and talks about submitting them to service endpoints, but I don't see anywhere it explicitly says, in general, how these must be encoded.
With GET as far as I know the only way to do it is using application/x-www-form-urlencoded in the query part of the URL (http://example.com?a=b&c=d) - though I don't know where in the standardsverse that practice is defined - so I guess that doesn't need to be said.
But for POST there are at least two options, application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data (for one definition of these see HTML 4.01 sec 17.13.4.1).
DALI sec 4.3.5 UPLOAD says that for inline uploads you have to use multipart/form-data. Some of the examples (e.g. sec 5.2 Synchronous Query) seem to show an ad-hoc(?) encoding that puts a name=value on each line without any encoding of spaces (I don't know whether this is literally intended/required to work, or whether it's just illustrative of the values). But other than that, I can't see instructions about POSTed parameter encoding in DALI or TAP.
Most TAP services seem to accept both multipart/form-data and application/x-www-form-urlencoded wherever parameters are POSTed. But I just encountered one that doesn't, and I don't know whether it is actually in violation of DALI/TAP or not.
So: should we add a note at the start of Section 4 saying that services are required to accept POSTed parameters in both application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data encodings?
DALI section 4 lists a number of parameters and talks about submitting them to service endpoints, but I don't see anywhere it explicitly says, in general, how these must be encoded.
With GET as far as I know the only way to do it is using
application/x-www-form-urlencodedin the query part of the URL (http://example.com?a=b&c=d) - though I don't know where in the standardsverse that practice is defined - so I guess that doesn't need to be said.But for POST there are at least two options,
application/x-www-form-urlencodedandmultipart/form-data(for one definition of these see HTML 4.01 sec 17.13.4.1).DALI sec 4.3.5 UPLOAD says that for inline uploads you have to use
multipart/form-data. Some of the examples (e.g. sec 5.2 Synchronous Query) seem to show an ad-hoc(?) encoding that puts aname=valueon each line without any encoding of spaces (I don't know whether this is literally intended/required to work, or whether it's just illustrative of the values). But other than that, I can't see instructions about POSTed parameter encoding in DALI or TAP.Most TAP services seem to accept both
multipart/form-dataandapplication/x-www-form-urlencodedwherever parameters are POSTed. But I just encountered one that doesn't, and I don't know whether it is actually in violation of DALI/TAP or not.So: should we add a note at the start of Section 4 saying that services are required to accept POSTed parameters in both
application/x-www-form-urlencodedandmultipart/form-dataencodings?