发送在帖子中编码的特殊字符是否正常

Question

I had a discussion with someone and could not come to a proper solution so I wanted to know how you guys think about this:

I have a html form and the other guy call him 'Aron' has got a .net system. My html form has a input text field called description. Aron his .net system catches my description Post and then changes this data in to XML.

BUT if a special character like & is posted, then he will get a parse error.

Now Aron is telling me that i need to post the & data as & and not as raw &.

What do you guys think about this?

Answer 1

For me it sounds more like a server-side problem. If I were you, I would create an object, serialize it to JSON, send it to this .NET application and let .NET developer do whatever he needs with it. I have sent proper data in accordance with my arhitecture and language.

It would be more proper and reasonable. Imagine the case - you don't work with Aron anymore, you work with Mark who takes your POST data and saves as plain text. He will ask "why are you sending HTML-encoded data to me? I do not need this". You definitely won't tell him "just decode it back" and you definitely don't want to change your code every time you change a partner. What if you work with both of them at the same time, or with 10 services at the same time?

As a consumer of a service, you should not bother about how this service is implemented. Moreover, you may now know how it is implemented, and it shouldn't affect your code.