Re: safe reload POST?

>>Contrary to unpopular belief, I don't need an IETF-blessed standard
>>to tell whether something is broken or not.  Reload is a reLOAD of the
>>response, not a REDO of the action that generated that response
> 
> So Netscape has a button that does the job of repeating (or REDOing)
> a request performed earlier. If they want to label that button "RELOAD"
> then that's fine by me and I'll continue to put it to good use to send
> more POSTed requests to a server.

If that were how it always worked, or even how Mosaic worked three years
ago, I would agree.  However, that isn't the case -- somebody changed
its functionality such that it now asks about rePOSTing content.
Somebody can just as easily change it in the future such that it
recognizes Content-Location and does the right thing.

> If you're saying that the action of (say) Netscape w.r.t to their
> reload button is wrong because it doesn't behave exactly as you described
> earlier then I think you're wrong... very wrong.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion.  However, Netscape's
functionality is unsafe and less convenient than what is defined in
HTTP/1.1 for doing safe reloads.  In my world, that makes it broken,
along with all other HTTP/1.0 browsers that do the same.

All I'm saying is that you don't need to invent a new mechanism to fix it --
just implement HTTP/1.1.

 ...Roy T. Fielding
    Department of Information & Computer Science    (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
    University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425    fax:+1(714)824-4056
    http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/

Received on Thursday, 26 September 1996 18:05:29 UTC