The current vague state of PUT and DELETE in HTML5

If you followed my REST in peace presentation, you probably noted that I was a bit angry against HTML5.

The story is pretty straightforward: the original working draft included also PUT and DELETE verbs in the forms’ method attribute, while, one year ago, an update to the draft removed them.

A month ago I announced that the working group was reconsidering its decision after the suggestions of Mike Amundsen: shortly after, we have a new proposal, which carries on the management of HTTP headers in the forms.

I still don’t know if the proposal will be implemented in HTML5, but imagine a world with:

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<form action="/users/1" method="PUT">
  <input type="header" name="Authorization" value="BASIC"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="realm" value="[email protected]"/>

  <input type="text" name="username"/>
  <input type="email" name="username"/>
  <input type="password" name="password"/>
        ...
</form>