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The whole "GETs must be side effect free" is a spec bug as far as I'm concerned. I can understand saying that they should be idempotent but besides opening the door to a bunch of metaphysical discussions aboutt "what exactly constitutes a side effect" I don't see what purpose that part of the spec serves. ________________________________ From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@x...] Sent: Thu 7/31/2003 8:57 AM To: xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: more politics On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 11:23:15 -0400, John Cowan <jcowan@r...> wrote: > Norman Walsh scripsit: > >> What if the GET drops a can of coke on your desk? > > Short of matter replication (Star Trek or Drexler varieties), it can't do > that. If the can is brought from somewhere else, that's a side effect, > and GETs have to be idempotent and therefore side-effect-free. Whoop! Whoop! Permathread warning ... Uhh, GET's are *supposed* to be side-effect free, but that's not enforced by anything I'm aware of in a typical HTTP implementation. I'm not at all sure that's true on the wild wild web, very definitely not in the case of pay-by-the-kilobyte wireless plans that have (well, "had" since I have an unlimited plan now) the side-effect of running up my cellphone bill every time I do a GET. Likewise, A little View Source expedition on Amazon.com shows a lot of "method=get" forms that seem to have what I would call side effects. (Fortunately, One-click ordering is not implemented with GET, but it *could* from a mechanical point of view, no?). So, I assert that there is no real-world software reason why clicking on a link could not result in a can of Coke being delivered to one's desk, although that would clearly be a Bad Thing in terms of the Webarch and the HTTP spec. Am I mistaken? ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
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