[Web-SIG] [extension] x-wsgiorg.flush

[Thomas Broyer]

2007/10/9, Graham Dumpleton <graham.dumpleton at gmail.com>:
> On 09/10/2007, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> >
> > Since GET is supposed to be side effect-free, skipping the
> > calculation of the response body (by not iterating over it) is less
> > likely to cause a problem than with another request method.  I guess
> > HEAD would be safe, too.
>
> Except that with the way that people use query strings to a GET
> instead of a POST with form data in the body, that GET can technically
> also have a content body, and how people in general abuse the method
> type, that probably often isn't the case. This is why I was querying
> the distinction, as not sure one can really say it is different to
> other methods unless HTTP specifications do indicate as much at least
> in relation to caching. Caching is an area I have never really looked,
> so I don't really know what the specifications say so this could all
> be irrelevant. :-)

Except that in this case, they probably don't send Last-Modified or
ETag headers, or if they do, their value is probably (almost) unique
to the request.
People abusing GET probably don't care about caching, so they won't
plug or enable such middlewares. And even if they'd do, well, it's
HTTP: such a middleware isn't much different from a caching
proxy/relay.

Note also that there are less abuses of GET each day (thanks to Google
Web Accelerator pre-fetching which highlighted the problem; and Web
2.0, AJAX and ReST becoming widespread and "educating" web developers)

-- 
Thomas Broyer