[Mailman-Developers] Re: GET vs POST (was Re: subscription confirmations)

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 04:29:52PM -0400, Gerald Oskoboiny wrote:
> > If I correctly understood your latter suggestion, then that's even
> > worse, because 'scoopers' can't even avoid it -- it's not marked as
> > 'magic' by the "?" character in the URL.
> 
> URLs are not 'magic' just because they have a "?" character in
> them; prefetchers can fetch URLs whether or not they have "?"s.
> Those URLs could point to news articles or messages in mail archives
> or something just as well as anything else.

A URL with a "?" character in it is known to be dynamic -- that is,
it's *expected* not to return the same content, depending on what
parameter it's given; this is why search engines customarily ignore
them... and it what I meant by "magic", in the context in which I was
using it.

> The way to make a distinction between HTTP requests that have
> side effects and those that don't is to use the request method
> (get, post, etc); this is what the spec says, and this is what is
> implemented in popular sites, HTTP proxies, caches and user agents.

This depends on whether you define "returns different things" as a side
effect of differing parameters to a GET; I don't think that's what the
standard means, but it isn't pertinent to my original argument in any
event.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
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