Ambiguous Output, A One-Way Street

[rodneyrehm]

With application/x-www-form-urlencoded any of the following declarations can be identified (because data is serialized in document order and names are not touched):

<input name="mix" value="alpha">
<input name="mix" value="bravo">
<!--
  { mix: ["alpha", "bravo"] }
  mix=alpha&mix=bravo
-->

<input name="mix[]" value="alpha">
<input name="mix[]" value="bravo">
<!--
  { mix: ["alpha", "bravo"] }
  mix[]=alpha&mix[]=bravo
-->

<input name="mix[0]" value="alpha">
<input name="mix[1]" value="bravo">
<!--
  { mix: ["alpha", "bravo"] }
  mix[0]=alpha&mix[1]=bravo
-->

<input name="mix[1]" value="bravo">
<input name="mix[0]" value="alpha">
<!--
  { mix: ["alpha", "bravo"] }
  mix[1]=alpha&mix[0]=bravo
-->

[darobin]

Right, but… is this an issue? I mean if the goal is to emulate app/xwfu in JSON there isn't really a point is there?

[macek]

I can't think of a reason the receiving application would need to know which style of input names was used to generate the resulting JSON.

Perhaps most importantly, you write the forms, so you can decide how you want the data to be structured.

[darobin]

@rodneyrehm Are you okay with closing this?

[rodneyrehm]

Sure! But I'd a note/warning to the spec that clearly states that this encoding does not reflect document structure - unlike application/x-www-form-urlencoded. You know, just to be explicit and transparent about this.