RFC 1867 (rfc1867) - Page 3 of 13

Form-based File Upload in HTML

RFC 1867             Form-based File Upload in HTML        November 1995


  ... (other elements) ...

3.  Suggested implementation

   While user agents that interpret HTML have wide leeway to choose the
   most appropriate mechanism for their context, this section suggests
   how one class of user agent, WWW browsers, might implement file
   upload.

3.1 Display of FILE widget

   When a INPUT tag of type FILE is encountered, the browser might show
   a display of (previously selected) file names, and a "Browse" button
   or selection method. Selecting the "Browse" button would cause the
   browser to enter into a file selection mode appropriate for the
   platform. Window-based browsers might pop up a file selection window,
   for example. In such a file selection dialog, the user would have the
   option of replacing a current selection, adding a new file selection,
   etc. Browser implementors might choose let the list of file names be
   manually edited.

   If an ACCEPT attribute is present, the browser might constrain the
   file patterns prompted for to match those with the corresponding
   appropriate file extensions for the platform.

3.2 Action on submit

   When the user completes the form, and selects the SUBMIT element, the
   browser should send the form data and the content of the selected
   files.  The encoding type application/x-www-form-urlencoded is
   inefficient for sending large quantities of binary data or text
   containing non-ASCII characters.  Thus, a new media type,
   multipart/form-data, is proposed as a way of efficiently sending the
   values associated with a filled-out form from client to server.

3.3 use of multipart/form-data

   The definition of multipart/form-data is included in section 7.  A
   boundary is selected that does not occur in any of the data. (This
   selection is sometimes done probabilisticly.) Each field of the form
   is sent, in the order in which it occurs in the form, as a part of
   the multipart stream.  Each part identifies the INPUT name within the
   original HTML form. Each part should be labelled with an appropriate
   content-type if the media type is known (e.g., inferred from the file
   extension or operating system typing information) or as
   application/octet-stream.





Nebel & Masinter              Experimental