That's right, that's the same issue. But in both cases, you can just send your list of items to fetch (respectively delete) in the body of the GET or DELETE request. (Because AFAIK, it's HTTP compliant to put a body in a GET request, even if it's rarely used).

Edit: I was wrong. It's allowed to put a body in a GET request, but it isn't OK to use it according to the HTTP spec (which admittedly kind of weird). Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/983458

Edit2: according to an edit int the SO response, it looks like I wasn't actually wrong: or at least not since 2014 when these RFCs[1][2] became the standard for HTTP.

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.1 [2]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7230#section-3.3

A body is and has always been syntactically permitted on any HTTP request.

However, it is semantic nonsense to put it on a DELETE or GET.

DELETE is defined to remove the resource identified by the URL; GET is defined to fetch the resource identified by the URL. There no purpose for an entity.

This is the point made in the SO answer I quoted, and this was the official position of the rfc2616[1], but as I said in my second edit, this rule was relaxed in the new version of the specification: rfc7231 published in 2014.

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.3 [2]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3.1

It looks more or less equivalent the situation previous.

> A payload within a GET request message has no defined semantics

It went from

> The GET method means retrieve whatever information (in the form of an entity) is identified by the Request-URI.

To :

> A payload within a GET request message has no defined semantics

Which, to me, sounds like: “it was forbidden to put info in the body, and now it's just not especially encouraged”. But maybe I'm over thinking the whole thing.