Comments on: In 2007 can we get richer HTTP support?

By: Dan Kubb

Dan Kubb — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:43:04 +0000

Tiago, I don’t think an achor is the correct element to execute a DELETE function. The anchor has traditionally been associated with GET requests, which are supposed to be safe. If we suddenly change this we’ll have users clicking on what they think are hyperlinks and accidentally deleting things.

By: Tiago Silveira

Tiago Silveira — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 10:54:36 +0000

Here’s one interesting topic. Can a FORM element support PUT? Is an anchor the correct element to execute a DELETE function? Maybe these two methods aren’t really useful to model user interactions.

Of course, doing it with Ajax is another story: we have access to HTTP header fields and can handle several special status codes (such as 409/Conflict) in meaningful ways.

By: Dan Kubb

Dan Kubb — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:06:15 +0000

I read somewhere that HTML 5 is going to support DELETE and PUT. I wouldn’t expect any browsers to support DELETE or PUT via HTML 4.x, since that would be outside the spec.

One approach that I would bet will catch on is for people to use javascript to scan the HTML and look for things (like Rails’ hidden input field called _method) and dynamically add onsubmit event handlers to the form. When the form is submitted, the event can fire and submit a real PUT or DELETE request via AJAX.