Are the HTTP methods different in 1.1 and 1.0?

Question

Greetings all,

I've been told by co-workers that the GET method is different in HTTP 1.0 and 1.1.

The way it was explained to me was that in HTTP 1.0 GET does not have a body, ergo you cannot add additional information in the body. All of the variables have to be specified in the URI as CGI type variables.

However, in HTTP 1.0 GET allows a body, so one could specify variables using XML (or whatever) in the body of the GET message.

Is this true? I've crawled the web looking for HTTP 1.0/1.1 documents, comparisons and otherwise, but I've never found the above statements? If it is true, can you point me to a reference so I can study up on it?

What about the other methods: PUT, POST and DELETE? Are the same or different between 1.0 and 1.1?

Answer 1

I don't think any method definitions changed.

Technically, you could have a request body for GET, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea, or that it'll work with all libraries/intermediaries/servers.

Answer 2

Why not take a look at the HTTP RFCs? They're not all that hard to read, and they're the authority. You could even just look at the 1.1 RFC and see what changed.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt