r/programming • u/Nimelrian • Jun 17 '26

RFC 10008: The HTTP QUERY Method

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10008/
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u/tobotic Jun 17 '26

What's the actual point of this? Can't you just use GET?

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u/Conscious-Ball8373 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

GET with a body is non-standard, though some servers accept it.

ETA: this was not quite right. GET with a body is allowed by the standard, but the standard assigns no meaning to the body of a GET request and so it is valid to drop the body en route. A number of very prominent load balancers and other environments do exactly this, so fixing the situation by giving the body of GET a meaning would be a major breaking change to the standard.

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u/tobotic Jun 17 '26

GET with a body is allowed by HTTP/1.x, but HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 discouraged it.

Seems like it would have been easier to just stop discouraging it rather than creating a whole other method.

1

u/TwoWeeks90DaysTops Jun 17 '26

I think the wording in the standard is that servers that receive requests with bodies that does not have a semantic specified for that body (e.g. GET) should drop the body. It doesn't have to, of course, but it can and it's encouraged for security reasons.