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
