Content-Transfer-Encoding in file uploading request

Question

I\'m trying to upload file, using XMLHTTPRequest, and sending this headers:

Content-Type:multipart/form-data, boundary=xxxxxxxxx

--xxxxxxxxx
Content-Disposition         


        

Answer 1

Xavier's answer doesn't sound right. RFC2616 also has this to say (section 3.7):

In general, HTTP treats a multipart message-body no differently than
any other media type: strictly as payload. The one exception is the
"multipart/byteranges"

It seems to me that section 19.4 of RFC2616 is talking about HTTP as a whole, in the sense that it uses a syntax similar to MIME (like headers format), but is not MIME-compliant.

Also, there is RFC2388. In section 3, last paragraph, it says:

Each part may be encoded and the "content-transfer-encoding" header
supplied if the value of that part does not conform to the default
encoding.

Section 4.3 elaborates on this:

4.3 Encoding

While the HTTP protocol can transport arbitrary binary data, the default for mail transport is the 7BIT encoding. The value supplied for a part may need to be encoded and the "content-transfer-encoding" header supplied if the value does not conform to the default encoding. [See section 5 of RFC 2046 for more details.]

Answer 2

My previous answer was wrong

Content-Transfer-Encoding may appear in the a composite body

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

There are several consequences of this. The entity-body for composite types MAY contain many body-parts, each with its own MIME and HTTP headers (including Content-MD5, Content-Transfer-Encoding, and Content-Encoding headers).