Re: Accessibility of Post vs Get Pages

>  From an accessibilty standpoint, should we really use POST at all?

There are fairly clearly defined rules for using POST and GET.  If
the request has significant side effects, you must use POST.  If
there are no such side effects you ought to use GET and, because of
historic abuse of GET for operations with side effects, you should
also add headers to explicitly permit caching, in the response.

One possible contra-indication to GET is non-American language data
and old forms, as the rules for handling non-ASCII characters in
GET URLs is only recent.

Misusing POST for cosmetic reasons is a user agent issue workaround,
not based on proper use of HTTP.

One other user agent based reason for GET is that POST is considered
so uncachable that a re-fetch can be forced simply by using the
back button.

Note:  If the response to a POST is just a confirmation, you should
redirect to GET in most cases.  Simply redirectiing will normally
redirect to POST.

Received on Thursday, 1 July 2004 03:28:03 UTC