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