Opera, on the other hand, has a very advanced method for dealing with site specific hacks. It’s worth a read just so to know what kind of stuff goes on in the browser that most people, including developers, never think about. They also link to how other browsers deal with the problem.

Safari seems to send the values of unnameed selects, despite these elements being invalid. So, you may get a query string like text1=test&=selval if your select that contained an option="selval" doesn’t have a name.

Internet Explorer 6 and 7 both mishandle buttons. Internet Explorer 6 sends all buttons with name attributes set, even though it should only send the button if it was clicked. Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t send unclicked buttons, but any time Internet Explorer 6 or 7 sends a button it sends the button’s innerHTML instead of the value.

So, given the deficiencies above, here’s how to compensate. If you’re using PHP, you don’t need to worry about Safari sending nameless selects as PHP seems to ignore them (or at least in parse_str). If you plan to use buttons, never give them names or values. Use radio controls if you have to do conditional actions based on what the user clicks.

I still have some other testing to do, but these findings should help you cover your bases if you’re working with forms.