Encoding the XML infoset in HTML forms

Every month or two I find myself remarking on the awkwardness of constructing XML on the client side. Are HTML clients forever condemned to using XMLHttpRequest? Must we await widespread support for Xforms?

In the spirit of The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work: Why don't we just standardize encoding the XML infoset in HTML forms?

Here's how you could POST an Atom entry (compare to example in draft 07):


<form action="http://localhost/foo" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="/entry/@xmlns" value="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"/>
Title: <input type="text" name="/entry/title">
Link: <input type="text" name="/entry/link/@href"/>
Id: <input type="text" name="/entry/id"/>
Updated: <input type="text" name="/entry/updated">
Summary: <input type="text" name="/entry/summary">
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">
</form>



That form encodes as

%2Fentry%2F%40xmlns=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2005%2FAtom&%2Fentry%2Ftitle=Atom-Powered+Robots+Run+Amok&%2Fentry%2Flink%2F%40href=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.org%2F2003%2F12%2F13%2Fatom03&%2Fentry%2Fid=urn%3Auuid%3A1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a&%2Fentry%2Fupdated=2003-12-13T18%3A30%3A02Z&%2Fentry%2Fsummary=Some+text.&submit=Submit


The pattern is: Name your HTML form elements using XPath syntax.

(What if all Atom powered blogs supported POSTing of form data in addition to the Atom syndication format? I guess I could construct a website that exposes a form like this, and permits you to direct your entry to any blog service. Not sure how useful that would be, but it doesn't seem any less useful than enabling a rich client do it ;) ).

I'm just reiterating the point I made here some time ago: form data is a perfectly good hypermedia representation, and it has a ton of support already in place.