Repeated field names in a form... Standard behavior?

[Andres Eduardo Hernando]

Hi,
I'm not entirely sure this is the right group to ask this question, but I saw a similar one above, and the group's
charter is not clear enough about it, so, here I go: ;)

What is the standard behavior (if any) when the same name is attached to more than one field in a <form>?

An example (that closely resembles the problem I'm working on) will be (this is a standard radio group without a
default selected option):
<form ...>
<input type="radio" name="Q1" value="1"> opt 1
<input type="radio" name="Q1" value="2"> opt 2
...
<input type="radio" name="Q1" value="n"> Don't know
</form>
The idea is that, in our context "Don't know" and "Don't answer" are very different things, so we want to keep track
of both possibilities. Off course, adding a "Don't Answer" option, selected by default, looks odd as we are forcing the user
to actually give an answer. So "Don't Answer" should be actually that: leaving the question unanswered.

If the user only clicks "submit" we won't get any value for the field "Q1", what is the right behavior as there wasn't
a selected option.

Now, I have discovered that, if I add:

<input type="hidden" name="Q1" value="NoAns">

Right after the <form ...> tag, I get "NoAns" if the user didn't make a choice, and the value associated with the
selected option if she did. This holds for all the browsers I have tried so far (IE6, NN7, NN4, Opera 7). Nevertheless, I'm
not sure if this is the standard behavior (to send back the last value associated with the field name), and I've been unable
to find anything on the web about this type of situations (maybe I didn't look in the right place so a pointer to some source
of information will be a nice answer).
I reckon that it's probably a bad idea to replicate field names in a form (even more if they are of different
'types') but the alternative way through this problem (to add a hidden field with a list of the questions included in the page
and then modifying the associated CGIs to explicitly scan for those questions) will require major surgery in the whole project
something we cannot afford right now... :)

Thanks a lot, and please, *do* let me know if this question is off-topic, I don't want to make your lives miserable.
Andres.

--

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Harlan Messinger <hm************ *******@comcast .net> wrote:

Which is the specification for HTML 2, which was superseded four
years ago by HTML 4, which states, "If no radio button in a set
sharing the same control name is initially "on", user agent
behavior for choosing which control is initially "on" is
undefined."

That's rather obscure, since it means that the HTML 2 type behavior is
allowed, and the behavior of not having any button "on" is allowed
(though a pedant might claim otherwise - "which control" might be seen
as implying that one of them is initially "on"), _and_ a browser might
make the last button "on" by default, or something else. I don't think
they really meant that. They just couldn't decide between two behaviors
and allowed both, without realizing what else became permitted.

But it's a strong reason to always include an initially selected radio
button into each group of radio buttons. It's strange that authors miss
this simple principle.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html