RE: FW: draft findings on Unsafe Methods (whenToUseGet-7)

Mark Jones wrote:
> With views like this having been very much in the ether for a 
> long time, it is hard to get the genie back in the bottle.  
> Since there are no guarantees anyway, I think a reasonable 
> middle ground for web services would be to have a standard 
> vocabulary for services to characterize their semantics along 
> many dimensions, including the strict GET/POST distinction.  
> This would be useful across bindings other than HTTP as well.

I think conflating the issue of why people use POST instead of GET with
the general issue of whether doing custom RPC over HTTP is a good idea
is a mistake. They're quite separate. The former is not incompatible
with the web to the same degree that the latter is.

Lots of web developers are using POST willy-nilly and underusing GET,
perhaps, but I would speculate that outside of SOAP, not too many spend
their time writing RPC interfaces and marshalling parameters. This is a
good thing.

Scott Cantor
cantor.2@osu.edu
Office of Info Tech
The Ohio State Univ