Comments on: Incompetent Boobs Part 3

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:03:49 +0000

The point is not so much “use DELETE” as it is “don’t use GET for destructive actions”. Using POST is good enough, and would have avoided the problem. (Using a JavaScript “onclick” action would work too, webcrawlers don’t normally implement JavaScript; though users with JS disabled would be out of luck.) The people behind Joomla, Drupal, Zope, Type3, WordPress, and Movable Type seem to be able to follow this rule; so whoever built this CMS can’t reasonably hide behind a ‘the browser made me do it’ defense.

By: Porter

Porter — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:44:10 +0000

Out of curiosity when was the DELETE action added, and made easily callable within a standard web browser? When was the CMS application developed? Most web browsers still don’t have support for the DELETE action w/o using JavaScript - and some don’t even have that. While I agree that you’re right - the appropriate action should be used that accurately matches what is being attempted; perhaps the ire you feel might be more rightly directed at the browser makers who never really bothered to build browsers supporting anything beyond GET and POST thusly hamstringing most web site and web application builders.

By: yachris

yachris — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:34:29 +0000

Do any browsers now support PUT and DELETE? Last I heard they didn’t (so POST is the way to go, I agree).