POST instead of GET for associate mode?

[Paul Crowley]

Nathan D. Bowen wrote:
> What I forgot was that it's only servers that already *produce* the 
> weird format; consumers only have to implement parsing.

Actually, consumers do have to produce this format, in order to validate 
signatures.

The reason we do things this way is this.  There's a standard format for 
sending key/value pairs in a web request that every toolkit supports 
well, so it's very convenient to use.  However, there's no standard 
format in responses, and if we try and use the same format as for 
requests then we may be deserted by our toolkits and wrestling with its 
complexities ourselves.  So for responses we're just going for something 
that's easy to produce and parse.  This format is also convenient for 
signatures, so we use it there too.  It's not too bad, but it's unlikely 
to be as convenient as the native support for x-www-form-urlencoded for 
requests in any toolkit.
-- 
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\/ o\ Paul Crowley, paul at ciphergoth.org
/\__/ http://www.ciphergoth.org/