[crazygringo]

Believe me, I've read the spec as I've wound up implementing HTTP servers from scratch multiple times a couple decades ago.

None of this suggestion is about incorporating all of HTTP's functionality. It's just the situations that you say you know I'm referring to -- verbs, things like authorization headers, a POST payload.

Expanding the functionality of hyperlinks wouldn't break anything about HTTP. It would just allow more requests to be defined in a single line of text (a hyperlink), rather than requiring lines of JavaScript to define. The browser (or cURL or whatnot) would convert the link to the actual HTTP request. Zero changes to HTTP.

[9dev]

Well. Hyperlinks are part of the spec though, and if you modify them and expect clients to know how to deal with that, you’ll need to modify the specification, and that implies you need to define how those changes affect caching, Proxies, and the security model. There’s a pretty good reason you send credentials in a header, not the URL. What’s my browser supposed to show in the history?

What you’re looking for is a browser extension, not a haphazard URI change.