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A comment on Microsoft REST API Guidelines. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft REST API Guidelines by lwf on Friday November 22, 2019 @07:04PM (#21611398)
POST is effectively the catch-all verb. There's nothing that violates HTTP spec in having a site that only has one endpoint, `POST /`, that specifies the actual JTBD somewhere in the request body. It's simply nasty and unidomatic.

c.f. https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

User agents still don't support PUT et all in forms without JavaScript -- you're limited to GET/POST, c.f. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/fo...

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Re:Microsoft REST API Guidelines by chrisseaton on Friday November 22, 2019 @07:14PM (#21611458)
> User agents still don't support PUT et all in forms without JavaScript

So why were they in the original HTTP spec if they weren't supported by original HTTP agents?

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Re:Microsoft REST API Guidelines by thephyber on Friday November 22, 2019 @09:36PM (#21612055)
> So why were they in the original HTTP spec if they weren't supported by original HTTP agents?

Bad assumption.[1]

HTTP/1.0 spec (1996) defined GET, POST, and HEAD.[2]

HTTP/1.1 spec (1997) defined all of the other, newer methods.[3]

> supported by original HTTP agents

The first web browsers I know about were Mosaic (1993) and Netscape Navigator (1994) predating the HTTP/1.0 RFC.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41411152/how-many-http-v...

[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945#section-5.1.1

[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068#section-9

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Re:Microsoft REST API Guidelines by yxhuvud on Saturday November 23, 2019 @02:29AM (#21612931)
What I still don't understand is why they didn't add support for them to forms.
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Re:Microsoft REST API Guidelines by detaro on Friday November 22, 2019 @07:45PM (#21611604)
They were only added in HTTP 1.1, and it's initial drafts had even more variants that were clearly for file management: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-00#sect...

This is before me being old enough to follow technology, so below is a good portion of conjecture and hearsay (I'd love to be corrected by someone who actually remembers it):

Tim Berners-Lee initial web browser was intended as an editing tool as well as a viewer, and these ideas came back when they went to write up HTTP as a a "proper" IETF standard. Not uncommon (bit less so today, but back then especially) to design specs with what they thought it should do, not what they'd tried/done in practice. Making an official spec is the chance to get this stuff in.

At some point, a bunch of the file-specific stuff was split off to WebDAV as an extra thing (work on that started 1996, HTTP 1.1 was finished 1997) - or rejected and WebDAV created as a new home for those ideas? But PUT among some others survived.

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