I read this article from Elliotte Rusty Harold yesterday, and its kind of stuck in my mind [1]. He writes about what the different types of HTTP requests were actually intended for; the difference between the verbs GET and POST. His point is that to view information, GET should be used so that the page can be bookmarked (or indexed, or emailed) and reused. POST is just for actions that shouldn’t be repeated – and he’s right.

His article is here: http://cafe.elharo.com/web/post-considered-inconvenient/ and its well worth the read. I don’t think I’d ever really thought about this before, or not in these terms. Thanks, Elliotte, for a great and thought-provoking article!

¹ Possibly because I’m writing a big search form and sorting mechanism for a big set of results at work! Since I work in manufacturing its all dates and partcodes and supplier codes and so on, not terribly exciting but a good illustration of when to use different posting methods.