POST instead of GET for associate mode?

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Nathan D. Bowen wrote:

> Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
>
> >Because the UA and redirects
> >aren't involved during the consumer <-> idserver assoc step, does anybody
> >have opinions on making that step be a POST instead of a GET, so the URLs
> >don't get ridiculously long?
> >
> Yes, I really like this idea.
>
> Are you thinking of POSTing a request in the same name/value format the
> server uses for responses?

No.  Regular ol' POST.  URL-encoded for sure, and possibly mime multipart
(the file upload type of POST), but I don't feel strongly either way on
the mime part.  It'll just have to be documented what we decide on mime.

> Unless someone notices a downside to switching to POSTs here,

Uh, extra parsing that your web framework will already do for you if we
use the normal POST format!

That's a huge downside.

> I'd prefer to read and debug the new name/value format over a long
> URL-encoded query string any day.

You shouldn't have to read it raw.  There are scripts and ethereal plugins
and firefox plugnis and perl one-liners that will convert any amount of
HTTP gibberish into readable structure.  Everybody has their own way and
we're not going to push some weird non-standard just to make some people's
lives marginally easier.  The only reason we were debating the response
dictionary's format is because no standard or convention existed in that
case.  In the request case, there does exist one (or two: MIME).

- Brad