The POST Method
The Post Method
- The POST method of input was the other
important change brought about by the introduction of
HTTP/1.0.
- The POST method allowed web browsers to
send an unlimited amount of data to a web server by allowing them
to tag it on to an HTTP request after the request headers as the
message body.
- Typically, the message body would be our
old familiar encoded URL string after the question mark (?).
- Thus, it would not be strange for a web
server to get a POST request that looked something like the
following:
POST /cgi-bin/phone_book.cgi HTTP/1.0
Referer: http://www.somedomain.com/Direcory/file.html
User-Agent: Mozilla/1.22 (Windows: I: 32bit)
Accept */*
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 29
name=Selena+Sol&phone=7700404
- Notice that the "Content-length" request
header is equal to the number of characters in the body of the
request. This is important because a CGI script could easily
parse through the variables in the body using the length.
- Of course, as with the GET method, the
user never needs to deal with the protocol itself. Instead, the
browser does all the work of preparing the POST request headers
and body.
- So the million-dollar question is how
does the browser get the name/value pairs to put into the HTTP
message body?
- The answer to that is HTML Forms.
Request Headers
Table of Contents
Intro to HTML Forms
|
