A difference that makes no difference is no difference (was: XML-RPC and HTTP)

[Russell Turpin]

Gordon Mohr:
>While in common practice, you are correct, the HTTP/1.1 specs would 
>disagree with you. See section 9; especially 9.1 on idempotency of methods 
>(which GET should have but POST need not) ..

Interesting. All I can do is point out that the Web would
break if GET were truly idempotent. Every time I visit CNN
or Yahoo, the results are different. Or pretty nearly every
time. Idempotency requires, among other things, that URLs
are immutable objects, at least as far as GET is concerned.
I suspect that fewer than one URL in a thousand satisfies
this.

I do believe there is a lot of benefit to the notion of
persistent IDs to immutable objects. I really, really do.
That's why people want pURLs. But that ain't plain old
URLs and GET, no matter what the spec says.

Russell


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