Three HTTP versions later, forms are still a mess

HTTP form handling remains problematic despite three HTTP protocol versions. The two main form encoding formats (application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data) are poorly specified, inefficient, and difficult to parse. URL-encoded forms can't handle large files efficiently due to encoding overhead, while multipart forms use arbitrary boundary separators that may conflict with data and lack proper length headers. Despite decades of web evolution and newer HTTP versions, form submission still relies on these legacy formats from the 1980s-90s, with limited modern alternatives available.