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

[James Graham]

Matthew Thomas wrote:
> All the Webmail application is doing is retaining visited/unvisited 
> presentation across whatever computer you log in to your Webmail from -- 
> which is part of the point of it being a Web application in the first 
> place. So that's not really a good example of a non-idempotent action, 
> and therefore not a reason for specs to condone non-idempotent links.

I should have stated explicitly that when I said "marking the message as 
read in some way" I intended that the "some way" could be more than just 
changing a message's unread flag, it could be e.g. moving the message 
from the inbox to a "Read messages" folder. Even if the message is 
"just" marked as read, this can change more than the appearance of the 
message - it can change where in the interface it is displayed (in some 
sort of virtual-folder based setup), etc.   So I don't think you can 
dismiss this as "not really a good example of a non-idempotent action" - 
it clearly /is/ non-idempotent yet representing the action as a link is 
normal and widely understood.