There's another article currently on the first page of HN discussing this issue. That post has a pointer to this [1] stackoverflow with the following quote from Roy Fielding:

    Yes. In other words, any HTTP request message is allowed to contain a message body,
    and thus must parse messages with that in mind. Server semantics for GET, however,
    are restricted such that a body, if any, has no semantic meaning to the request.
    The requirements on parsing are separate from the requirements on method
    semantics.

    So, yes, you can send a body with GET, and no, it is never useful to do so.

    This is part of the layered design of HTTP/1.1 that will become clear again once
    the spec is partitioned (work in progress).

    ....Roy

[1] -- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/978061/http-get-with-requ...