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by acabal 4 days ago
Supporting more than GET/POST in HTML forms has been my dream for decades. There's a WHATWG proposal to do just that if you want to add your voice: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/11347
2 comments

I'm not convinced of the benefit of allowing PUT/PATCH/DELETE in forms. But QUERY sounds more useful, and its lack of side-effects (plus the lack of legacy code using it) would avoid the need for CORS preflight requests.

There is a separate issue for QUERY: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/12594

What’s the use case for that?
Because if HTTP is the language of the web, then HTML forms are how humans speak that language to computers. Right now we humans can only speak GET and POST.

In other words, right now if a human wants to DELETE a widget, the human has click on an HTML form to `POST /widgets/123/delete` - i.e. use an incorrect verb on an incorrect URL/object - or use some other workaround like smuggling a special `_method=DELETE` variable. This is unnatural and semantically incorrect, resulting in ugly hacks that break HTTP-level expectations like idempotency; and it also requires additional app-level logic to process.

Meanwhile a machine is allowed to simply `DELETE /widgets/123` because their interface to HTTP is not clicking on HTML forms.

We humans could converse with websites in semantically correct HTTP, have clean URLs in which both REST APIs and human-facing URLs are identical without hacks, and require no extra app/framework logic, if HTML forms simply allowed all (human-relevant) HTTP verbs.

Things like that are why it's completely unreasonable to expect websites to work without first party Javascript. Utterly basic and mundane functionality is gated behind Javascript.

Building the mundane in the absence of JavaScript isn't some small thing you can build. It's going to require you to rebuild your entire site around the idea. Things like a searchable dropdown will now turn a single page form into a horrifying multi page mess where you get sent to a page for just the dropdown and the search box and selectable options, which then send you back to the original form. That is going to require you to store a lot of the form data on the server to keep track of what you entered across pages rather than let the browser do its thing.

The noscript crowd should have lobbied for a better HTML instead of rallying against JavaScript.

I don't want to write Javascript for what should be a core feature of Basic HTML forms.
It is almost a use case in itself: to make an form in pure HTML to allow user to update/delete a resource on the server, without violating the HTTP semantics with routes like `POST /items/:id/delete`.