Comments on: POST Considered Inconvenient

By: ahm

ahm — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:13:18 +0000

The failure of XHTML is because the whole concept is not-logical. For instance, you define XML to be eXtensible and that implicate that tags are always closed. Ok, this is understandable when tags are not defined a priori, , you cannot know if second wee is inside first or not then you disambiguate using end tags always e.g. .

By: koray

koray — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 15:46:54 +0000

As for people that say XHTML1 or XHTML1.1 is hard to learn. I started learning html for the first time at the beginning of February 2006, now 11 months later I am able to write all my sites using valid XHTML1.1. So if I can do it surely others can pick it up too

By: aardvark

aardvark — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 03:42:31 +0000

Two years ago, in this millennium we developed an application that submitted user-generated data using GET. At the time our large QA lab found large data failed to make it to the servers. Indeed, there are browsers with GET limits and those limits are greater, but reachable, with POST. Yep, some urban legends are based in truth. I’m just a tad bit surprised that the author didn’t run just a FEW tests before trying to bust the “myth”.

By: Mike Smith

Mike Smith — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 21:48:43 +0000

If there is a limit, itâ€™s so high as to be bandwidth limited. I have sent very large (megabytes) amounts of data through single GET requests, and the only limit I have encountered in years is in server side frameworks like PHP. When thatâ€™s a problem, you fix the server side framework and reinstall it. The clients and intermediaries just work.

By: warpedvisions.org » Blog Archive » POST a PITA?

warpedvisions.org » Blog Archive » POST a PITA? — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:09:15 +0000

[...] November 1st, 2006 in Links HTTP POST considerd inconvinent. Not quite as snappy as “considered harmful”, but an interesting read. [...]

By: Charlie Thomas

Charlie Thomas — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:56:16 +0000

Sergey, thank you! It’s not good news but the documentation is just what I was looking for. Looks like I’ll have to stay with POST for a while after all.

By: Sergey Kornilov

Sergey Kornilov — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:56:51 +0000

We develop a software named PHPRunner that generates PHP application. After we changed search page to use GET instead of POST one of our users found that his search page doesn’t work anymore. Experimenting with it I found that GET limit in IE is about 2000 bytes.
Haven’t tested this with IE7 yet.

Found it:
Maximum URL length is 2,083 characters in Internet Explorer
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427

By: Charlie Thomas

Charlie Thomas — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:28:04 +0000

Sergey, did you find documentation on the IE6 GET limit somewhere? Or did you have to find this out through experimentation. When I tried to look into this a few years ago I couldn’t find much explicit documentation — just a lot of veiled warnings and “urban legends”. Maybe things haven’t improved much. Thanks.

By: Sergey Kornilov

Sergey Kornilov — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:17:53 +0000

IE6 won’t submit a GET form if combined amount of request is more than 2000 bytes. Works fine in Firefox though.

If you use Javascript to submit such a from it gives you syntax error.
If you use simple Submit button it does nothing.

By: Gavri Fernandez

Gavri Fernandez — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:06:09 +0000

About half the times I find a website that uses POST and I want to bookmark the result of a form submission, I notice that the application does not differentiate between GET and POST and I can bookmark it anyway (I use the Web Developer FF extension for this purpose. A couple of clicks. No need to save the page locally)

I’m surprised that you claim there are no length limits to urls in browsers. The most widely used browser IE6 has a length limit of 2083 characters (I hit this limit recently. No warning. No error message. Nothing. The browser simply does not make the request)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427