don't use POST for big GET [was: Dictionaries in HTML ]

In message <Pine.SUN.3.90.960201175844.26919D-100000@jobe.shell.portal.com>, "D
avid W. Morris" writes:
>
>
>On Thu, 1 Feb 1996, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
>> > Was the character encoding problem, ever resolved with respect to i18n
>> Any other forms should be handled with "FORM METHOD=POST
>> ENCTYPE=multipart/form-data" as that encoding allows charset tagging
>> of the values.
>
>The fundamental problem with this proposal is that it changes the
>accepted semantics for POST vs. GET.

Yikes! You're right.

Larry: please don't recommend that folks use POST for query operations,
nor use GET for operations with non-trivial side effects.

The problem is that the deployed base of HTTP servers don't handle GET
requests with "very long" URLs. (What's the magic number? 1024 or
something?)

We might look at this as a simple software defect, and expect the
servers to get fixed.

On the other hand, mandating support for arbitrarily long request
lines in HTTP opens servers up to denial of service attacks and
interferes with lots of handy performance optimizations.

I suggest HTTP be extended to include a GET-like method where
large amounts of query data can be sent in the body of the request.
For example:

	GETQ /search? HTTP/1.x
	Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

	search=a+b+c&stuff=xyz

Dan

Received on Sunday, 4 February 1996 12:56:07 UTC