I know, I know, I’m such a fucking nerd. This is from an e-mail I just sent, and felt like sharing with even more people:

I learned something about the way the intarweb is supposed to work from the Rails book. Being an intarweb standards dork, I thought it was interesting and decided to share Yet Another Unadhered To W3C Usage Recommendation(tm). It also explains why browsers give you that popup when you try to refresh a POST request.

You see, we’ve got out two HTTP request methods, GET and POST. They each have a very specific usage, but nobody pays any attention to that whatsoever, despite the useage recommandation for them being so old that it was in the HTML 2 spec.

Simply put, GET is used to retrieve data, and POST is to cause a change in your application’s state (for example, causing an action).

If you recall when Google released is Web Accelerator, everyone wambulanced about it clicking all of the links and accidentally deleting content or what have you when an administrative user was using the software. That wasn’t Google’s fault, though; developers had just ignored the standard. The web accelerator pre-fetched GETs (hyperlinks), and not POSTS (forms, etc.).

For more info, see some random Finnish university’s website.

You are all now enlightened!