all, some time ago i read about REST<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer> . at first i thought for web services SOAP is much better for the self describing feature of the WSDL. then, reading through the Zend certification preparation book, there was a section on using POST vs. GET to request data from the server. The section said in general to use GET when information on the server was not going to me altered. So i have now started to set the method attribute of the form tag to get on those forms that do not modify data on the server. Looking over PHP i can see a web service client could be written for a RESTful web service using the curl extension (and perhaps others as well) because it facilitates an ability to invoke the HTTP PUT and DELETE methods. Now, coming to my question.. Looking at the W3C page on the XHTML 1.0 form tag specification <http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_form.asp>, it is clear the method attribute supports only get and post. What i wonder is why would it not also support put and delete? im sure javascript could be used to invoke the put and delete methods, but is there a way to do this w/ XHTML ? certainly it would be cleaner to map actions in an application to specific http methods rather than have an action variable or whatever on every page. since the form tag supports get and post, still on every page that offers add / delete functionality an action (or similar) variable is still necessary. can someone speak to this ? thanks, -nathan
