Form POST vars and xhtml

[praggers]

Here's a poser:

PHP automatically makes html <form> vars available in the script named as the form's action attribute. But the only ones made available are the html 'name' entities. The html 'id' entities are not propagated.

This is not much of a problem UNLESS you want to move up to xhtml standard code. In xhtml, attribute 'names' are deprecated in favour of attribute 'id' values.

So currently the only solution I can think of is to double-up on object naming like this:
<input type="text" id="username" name="username" class="grey10" />
Does anybody know a better way out of this dilemma? creating the same data entity twice with different names seems to me to be pretty dumb.

[Anon]

This is not a PHP problem, though. Remember, PHP runs on the server, so it doesn't see any <input> tag, any id attribute nor any name attribute. It is the browser that takes the form fields, puts them into HTTP format and then send them to the web server. Therefore, it is up to the browser to decide what to send, and what name to assign it; it is not up to PHP.

Therefore, it will have to be defined in the XHTML specs that form fields should be submitted to the action target through HTTP using the ID attribute. Now, I haven't read the entire XHTML spec, so I don't know if it already has that. And even if it does, it will take a long time till the browsers actually implement that...I mean, look at the date of the HTML4.01 spec - December 1999, and browsers still don't fully support it.

Diego