In article <1994Feb15.074050.25372 at comp.bioz.unibas.ch>, doelz at comp.bioz.unibas.ch (Reinhard Doelz) writes:
>> A couple of weeks ago, there was a discussion on comp.infosystems.www
> whether file input is considered to be useful/needed in the POST type
> of forms submission. The thread died with the message that it were on the
> drawing board.
>> [Q]
> I need to create a html file which requests file input from a client.
> I.e., the mosaic/lynx/whatever client should open a file browser on the
> local system and the selected file is to be transmitted as file to the
> server.
>> [hack]
> cut-and-paste with freetext forms input has severe limitations and is
> difficult to achieve with (very) large input (talking > 1000 bytes here).
>> [A]
> ? Has anyone tried at NCSA, CERN or elsewhere to implement this feature ?
> Biologists would very much appreciate this. Thanks for replies in advance!
>[...]
> This is being discussed in conjunction with Lynx development, and the
consensus is that we need some kind of tag associated with forms which will
transmit the file independently from the client's site to the server for
integration into the form's function. It would be relatively easy to add a
command in clients to import a user-specified file instead of keyboard input
for form entries, but software using memory instead of disk-file caching could
have problems with this (it would be only a matter of time before a novice
user tried to import the entire GenBank database into the form 8-).
Once this is worked out and implemented, biologists (and others for
equivalent kinds of services) also need some standards for dealing with
conversions of files. For example, one may need to convert GCG-format
sequences to FastA-format if that's what the form function is expecting.
Fote
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