Quick question about <input name="...">

D

David

Hello,

I have what should be a simple question but I can't find a reference
to the answer. I've been diging through the W3C and other sources
for the specifications on the <inpu> tag. Specifically, what is
the maximum recommended length that should be supported by the
name parameter?

I've been doing some simple HTML Forms and decided to see what
ASP and various other scripting languages could do. Anyway, like
most novice users it didn't take me long to "shoot myself in the
foot". I've been tying with MS IIS v6 on Windows XP, vbasic, ASP,
and a rather simple task of reading some Jet Databases with some
web forms.

Part of a form I created today took a while to diagnose the true
problem given the limited diagnostics on web projects. The line
in my HTML Form was something like the following:

<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="TwentyCharacterName1"
VALUE="TwentyCharacterName1"/>

The complaint offered by the server (detail diagnostics on) was
that ['<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN""]' wasn't a valid value. It took me
a while to discover what was unique about this particular line as
I've used this statement for years with other servers. (mainly
Apache) It seems that the real problem was that the 20-character
name was too long. I'm guessing that IIS somehow detected the
long name and generated an error my IE v7 browser could understand.
It didn't look like there was time for a double exchange between
the browser and server anyway. My problem was just using
recognizable names for rather large pages.

What is the maximum name length that browsers, servers,
and CGI Posts should understand?

Thank you,

David
 
J

Joel Shepherd

David said:
Hello,
Hi.

Part of a form I created today took a while to diagnose the true
problem given the limited diagnostics on web projects. The line
in my HTML Form was something like the following:

<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="TwentyCharacterName1"
VALUE="TwentyCharacterName1"/>

The complaint offered by the server (detail diagnostics on) was
that ['<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN""]' wasn't a valid value.

I'm confused. What is the [' at the beginning of that, and the "]' at
the end? If that (square brackets, mis-matched single quotes, extra
double quote) are actually in your source or HTML somewhere, it's no
wonder you're having trouble.

And what exactly was the error text you were receiving?
 
D

David

Hello Joel,

David said:
Hello,
Hi.

Part of a form I created today took a while to diagnose the true
problem given the limited diagnostics on web projects. The line
in my HTML Form was something like the following:

<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="TwentyCharacterName1"
VALUE="TwentyCharacterName1"/>

The complaint offered by the server (detail diagnostics on) was
that ['<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN""]' wasn't a valid value.

I'm confused. What is the [' at the beginning of that, and the "]' at
the end? If that (square brackets, mis-matched single quotes, extra
double quote) are actually in your source or HTML somewhere, it's no
wonder you're having trouble.

That is part of the error text, the only readable part, that IIS(?)
returns when a form has a problem. The ']' is usually where the
problem is, but is never actually shown. Kind of like a compiler
that stops ahead of the word it can't parse.
And what exactly was the error text you were receiving?

That was it. There is also an error number that is generally
meaningless. x8005000A or something like that; I don't recall
the specific number as it never seems to mean much. The error
page is the result of a 500 (ill formatted HTML) and usually
includes the line number and perhaps column of the problem.
The line count is usually off by a few lines.

I've determined that the long NAME value was the problem.
I'll write another script today to check all the sizes and
find where IIS dies. They have so many problems that simply
do not conform to the HTML specifications. The hard ones
to spot are values that IIS doesn't want quoted and others
that are. It seems that the ASP/vbasic processor isn't
very consistant in its rules.

I'm used to writing CGI applications on Unix and Windows.
I'm trying to stay with tools that my friends can use/buy
to maintain the site they've asked me to make. For now
that is XP, IIS, ASP, vbasic, and a text editor.

David
 
H

Harlan Messinger

David said:
Hello,

I have what should be a simple question but I can't find a reference
to the answer. I've been diging through the W3C and other sources
for the specifications on the <inpu> tag. Specifically, what is
the maximum recommended length that should be supported by the
name parameter?

I've been doing some simple HTML Forms and decided to see what
ASP and various other scripting languages could do. Anyway, like
most novice users it didn't take me long to "shoot myself in the
foot". I've been tying with MS IIS v6 on Windows XP, vbasic, ASP,
and a rather simple task of reading some Jet Databases with some
web forms.

Part of a form I created today took a while to diagnose the true
problem given the limited diagnostics on web projects. The line
in my HTML Form was something like the following:

<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="TwentyCharacterName1"
VALUE="TwentyCharacterName1"/>

The complaint offered by the server (detail diagnostics on) was
that ['<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN""]' wasn't a valid value.

It isn't a value at all, so this makes no sense. Can you give us the
full, accurate diagnostic message? It would be much more effective than
making people guess. Also, it would be very helpful for you to give a
chunk of the code surrounding this tag. Just because this is where the
parser first realized for certain that there was an error condition,
doesn't mean that the cause of the error didn't begin earlier.
 

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