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by dragonwriter 1115 days ago
Verbs specify safety/idempotency guarantees for API-blind middleware, as well as whether (if either applies) a body needs taken into account; POST is not idempotent, SEARCH/QUERY is safe, and therefore also idempotent, but differs from GET in that that guarantee is body-specific.
1 comments

Might as well just say "ok now GET can have body" instead of all that noise
Won’t retroactively change things that support GET to support GET-with-body. A new verb makes it much more likely that anything that supports the verb supports the desired semantics.

(Of course, you could instead bump the HTTP version for support of GET-with-body, but given how HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are defined in terms of HTTP/1.1, you’d need three new versions of HTTP for a change to core verb semantics. A new verb, again, is far simpler.)