Re: REST and the Web

On Saturday 30 March 2002 03:09 am, Paul Prescod wrote:
> I don't know what you mean. POST versus GET are only "information
> hiding" if you happen to have software that treats GETs as
> transparent and POSTs as opaque. 

Joshua and others have already described the logic used. People use 
GET for permanent bookmarkable things that they don't mind exposing, 
and POST for everything else.

> But everybody does this on the web all of the time! When I go to
> eBay I don't see your auctions, I see mine!

I was talking about mapping 'functional' resources onto URI's, or 
passing parameters from a form to a URI. Things like the proposal for 
variable substitution in the submission URI make it easier to map 
services into URI space (especially with well-defined GET-able 
resources). In leiu of a framework for doing this, people have 
traditionally used POST. SOAP over HTTP/XML-RPC is a logical extension 
(to developers)  of POST.

> > You can't ignore either the user community *or* the vendor
> > community. Both have already voted!
>
> Five years ago they said that stylesheets would never be implemented
> on the Web because the user and vendor community had already voted.

That's a poor analogy. In one case, the community and vendors have 
already adopted technology, and in the other, hadn't. You cannot 
ignore what large numbers of people already do, and where vendors are.

Received on Saturday, 30 March 2002 13:07:09 UTC