RE: GET, POST, and side-effects

David W. Morris writes:

 > Well, it doesn't seem like a major extension to the GET method to
 > allow for an entity body from the HTTP documents perspective.
 > 
 > Use the ENCTYPE attribute of the FORM element to tell the UA to
 > use urlencoding in the entity body for GET rather than the URL.
 > This improves privacy as well in that the URL no longer would
 > contain sensitive data.

I like this idea.  It does represent a small extension to HTML though.

This is from
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/fill-out-forms/overview.html:

	ENCTYPE specifies the encoding for the fill-out form contents. This
	attribute only applies if METHOD is set to POST -- and even then,
	there is only one possible value (the default,
	application/x-www-form-urlencoded) so far.

(Is this current information?)

This would have to be changed to allow this same value for method=GET forms,
indicating there's stuff in the request body.

There is one slightly nasty implication of this.  Caches would have to
save the body of a request as part of the cache key for GETs if this
were part of the protocol!  This is, of course, what we were contemplating
anyway for POST-W-N-S-E.

--Shel

Received on Friday, 5 January 1996 22:08:26 UTC