Do browsers preserve order of inputs with same name on GET/POST?

Question

I have this HTML code with multiple inputs with the same name:

<input type="hidden" value="42" name="authors" /> <input type="hidden" value="13" name="authors" /> <input type="hidden" value="33" name="authors" /> 

The order of the values is important. Does the HTML spec define that user agents have to preserve this order, and if yes, do the common (market share > 1%) browsers follow this definition?

Bonus points if someone knows if WSGI and especially Django preserve the order server-side :-)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, they should be sent in the order they appear according to the html rfc

See 8.2.1. The form-urlencoded Media Type:

The fields are listed in the order they appear in the document with the name separated from the value by = and the pairs separated from each other by &. Fields with null values may be omitted. In particular, unselected radio buttons and checkboxes should not appear in the encoded data, but hidden fields with VALUE attributes present should.

I've found in the spec for html 4.0 too:

For url encoded data:

The control names/values are listed in the order they appear in the document. The name is separated from the value by = and name/value pairs are separated from each other by &.

For multipart data (thanks @Chuck):

A "multipart/form-data" message contains a series of parts, each representing a successful control. The parts are sent to the processing agent in the same order the corresponding controls appear in the document stream. Part boundaries should not occur in any of the data; how this is done lies outside the scope of this specification.