[whatwg] A thought: <a href="..." method="post">

[Lachlan Hunt]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> I was just thinking about the recent problems introduced by the Google 
> Web Accelerator following links that have side effects (the typical <a 
> href="form?delete=10">[delete this]</a> stuff)...

So, is this a suggested solution to that problem...

> A related extension might be a method attribute to anchor tags.  One 
> might expect <a href="form?delete=10" method="POST">[delete this]</a> to 
> do a post request to "form" with a request body of "delete=10".  Or it 
> could do a post with an empty request body, but unfortunately a large 
> number of web frameworks ignore URL variables in post requests.
> 
> The Google Web Accelerator will still be broken (the method attribute wouldn't 
> magically appear on all the many applications out there),

...which doesn't really solve the problem at all?

 From what I understand, it's not Google's web accelerator that's 
broken, but rather the implementations that use links instead of forms 
and depend on JavaScript for confirmation.  Anything that 
unconditionally depends on JS is broken by design, not the tool that 
doesn't make use of it.

Ideally, if JS is used for confirmation like in the apps that I've heard 
are affected, the script should modify the URI in some way to pass 
additional confirmation information (eg. appending a ...&confirmed=1 
parameter).  In the absence of that confirmation, the server could then 
send a page with a form requesting confirmation.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
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