<form method="GET|POST|PUT|DELETE" />

Hello,

I would like to raise the question of <form> methods to the group.

Currently, only GET and POST are specified as acceptable method
values: see http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.3

I looked through the WHATWG document and could find no reference to
this issue, so I assume that there is no proposal for change at
present, see http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/

Looking at the HTTP/1.1 specification, there is a core standard
specifying PUT and DELETE as well, see
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

Given the growing acceptance of REST I would like to propose that
these two methods are also incorporated into the html5 specification
so that browser-based REST UAs are not forced to implement clientside
XmlHttpRequest. This will permit a more graceful degradation of
RESTful applications in the face of disabled JavaScript.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/

As these two methods are not currently supported in the existing html
specification, I can't see a backwards compatibility issue (although
others may know more than me in this regard).

Consideration might also be made of supporting OPTIONS as well (to
facilitate RESTful service discovery).

Regards,
Alan Dean
http://thoughtpad.net/alan-dean

Received on Thursday, 10 May 2007 12:38:54 UTC