Re: GET / DELETE request bodies

> On Feb 17, 2020, at 1:53 AM, Cory Benfield <cory@lukasa.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> The semantic requirement missing is that DELETE bodies have no
> spec-defined semantics. This is not that they can't have semantics, or
> that they shouldn't have spec-defined semantics, only that no
> specification has ever said what a body in a DELETE request means.

FTR, this is a common misinterpretation, but that is not what it says and
certainly not what it means.

They have no semantics in the sense that a body cannot change the meaning
of a received request. They are absolutely forbidden to have any impact
whatsoever on the processing or interpretation of the request aside from
the necessity to read and discard the bytes received in order to maintain
the message framing. The only reason we didn't forbid sending a body is
because that would lead to lazy implementations assuming no body would
be sent.

This has always been the case for HTTP and GET/HEAD/PUT/DELETE.
They were defined that way so that the URL would identify the resource
and intermediaries would not have to delve into the body to reinterpret
the semantics defined by method and header fields.

The other request methods are more like POST and the original SEARCH.
OPTIONS was defined much later with the intent of maybe needing a
body for more complex queries, but we didn't have the energy or need
to actually define one.

....Roy

Received on Monday, 17 February 2020 18:44:49 UTC