- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 23:30:55 +0000
- To: Adam van den Hoven <adam.vandenhoven@gmail.com>
- CC: "public-html@w3.org Tracking WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Adam van den Hoven wrote: > Good morning, > > I've been thinking about this as I'm building an online banking > application for the iPhone. I've often argued that HTML browsers are > not RESTful clients since they are only capable of issuing GET and > POST commands (at least from user initiated events). JavaScript and > the XHR object is restful, but the browser itself is not. I've always > thought that this was a failing of HTML; its resulted in some > (necessarily) unfortunate design. Either you use a GET to delete > something or you create a form that consists solely of a submit > button. Either you have suspicious markup or you have ill-advised > server code. > > I think that there are some very simple things that we can do to > improve the state of things. > > 1) Allow a METHOD attribute on any element that allows an HREF or > ACTION attribute (namely 'a' and 'form' tags) > 2) Allow any HTTP method in the METHOD attribute, including those not > defined by HTTP. (i.e. allow one to introduce new, ad hoc methods - > which is allowed by the HTTP spec - without breaking HTML) Unfortunately it is not clear that this will not break sites. At present unknown methods are treated as GET in browsers; this behavior is required in the web-forms 2 draft [1]. There is also a non-negligible population of sites using method values not in the set (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) (e.g. [2] which reports all method attribute values encountered on a survey of ~15k sites). [1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#methodAndEnctypes [2] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pjt47/misc/method.txt
Received on Tuesday, 18 December 2007 23:31:03 UTC