Quite often I have the need to represent structured objects in HTML forms, for example I’d like to be able to represent the following structure:

interface Reservation {
  attending: boolean;
  guests: Guest[];
}

interface Guest {
  firstName: string;
  lastName: string;
}

I’ve often seen square bracket and dot notations used to represent such data structures in HTML forms, for example:

<form>
  <select name="attending">
    <option value="true">Yes</option>
    <option value="false">No</option>
  </select>
  <input type="text" name="guests[0].firstName">
  <input type="text" name="guests[0].lastName">
  <input type="text" name="guests[1].firstName">
  <input type="text" name="guests[1].lastName">
</form>

My question is, is this notation based on any standard? If so which standards are available? I am specifically looking for a solution that parses this form data structure on the server-side, without adding any client side JavaScript.