Like mentioned in another comment, if somebody used a GET http link to logout from a webpage, you would end up with a ton of surprised users. People who read articles by highlighting the text with the mouse would also probably hover over all of the links and would end up wasting bandwidth for no reason.

> if somebody used a GET http link to logout from a webpage,

If you violate the standards, your website doesn't work. Who knew?

> People who read articles by highlighting the text with the mouse would also probably hover over all of the links and would end up wasting bandwidth for no reason.

"For no reason" is obviously wrong, making the web snappier is a reason.

Maybe browsers should only prefetch links on bloated websites since their owners clearly don't mind wasting bandwidth.

This is just an ignorant response. The history of the internet is littered with pragmatic solutions to standard vs. non-standard approaches for exactly these reasons. See: <image>, Referer header, the HTML standard as a whole.

By the way, if your standard contradicts a popular methodology, it's probably a bad standard.

> By the way, if your standard contradicts a popular methodology, it's probably a bad standard.

You can't assume a methodology is good just because it's popular. That's how you get cargo cults.

But if a methodology violates the standards, it's almost certainly bad.