Re: Issue: request bodies

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> RFC2616, section 4.3;
> 
> "A message-body MUST NOT be included in a request if the specification 
> of the request method (section 5.1.1) does not allow sending an 
> entity-body in requests. "
> 
> GET, HEAD and DELETE do not allow for an entity-body in requests.
> 
> Granted, it's not incredibly well-specified, but are you seriously 
> suggesting that bodies should be allowed on GETs?

My two main concerns are:

- Hardwiring more stuff that doesn't need to be hardwired; if somebody 
sends a request body wirh FOOBAR, and FOOBAR hasn't got a specification 
for a request body, the receiving server should simply read the request 
body, then throw it away. Implementors already have enough problems with 
the one special case that exits (response body for HEAD), so I think 
avoiding more special cases would make a lot of sense.

- Extensibility: I agree it's not likely, but what if a revision of 
HTTP/1.1 or an extension spec would specify an optional request body for 
one of these methods?

Best regards, Julian

Received on Saturday, 22 April 2006 07:31:04 UTC