Re: can GET do for QUERY? extending Partial Content

> On 29 Apr 2015, at 10:18, Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:12:59AM +0200, henry.story@bblfish.net wrote:
>> Adding the query in the GET body, allows for semantically well defined 
>> query languages to be used, that could become globally available across the
>> web. 
>> 
>> For the type of queries I am interested in that provide partial 
>> representations of the original resource, GET fits the bill. There
>> is precedent for partial representations too. Essentially we are suggesting
>> extending the partial representation concept to allow us to specify the
>> representation using more complex languages than those provided by byte 
>> ordering.
>> 
>> I hope that helps show that this is not an abuse of GET, it just extends
>> existing usage.
> 
> You may want to extend but you cannot decide to replace existing products
> which will not comply with your extensions unfortunately. There *are* many
> deployed products which will not cope well with a body in a GET request
> for various reasons and while I agree that from a messaging perspective
> it should not be a problem, from an interoperability perspective it's
> definitely going to be one.

One shoud be able to verify this. I tested it with the Apache on my server
and it had no problem, even though it knows nothing about the meaning of
GET requests with a body.

One could further and make a crawl of a large distributed section of the web 
with a  normal GET query and the proposed  one and see what types of errors 
appear. The benefits of the extension can then be compared with the gained value. 

But anyway, keep in mind that I don't expect the usage of clients generating 
GET  requests with query content on arbitrary servers to grow that fast. 
Initially requests will mostly be made from clients that know that the 
servers can accept this request. So this should not be an issue.

Henry


> 
> Willy
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Wednesday, 29 April 2015 08:35:33 UTC