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.
