Are the PUT, DELETE, HEAD, etc methods available i

Question

I've seen a couple questions around here like How to debug RESTful services, which mentions:

Unfortunately that same browser won't allow me to test HTTP PUT, DELETE, and to a certain degree even HTTP POST.

I've also heard that browsers support only GET and POST, from some other sources like:

• http://www.packetizer.com/ws/rest.html
• http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg13518.html
• http://www.xml.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/1098

However, a few quick tests in Firefox show that sending PUT and DELETE requests works as expected -- the XMLHttpRequest completes successfully, and the request shows up in the server logs with the right method. Is there some aspect to this I'm missing, such as cross-browser compatibility or non-obvious limitations?

Answer 1

HTML forms support GET and POST. (HTML5 at one point added PUT/DELETE, but those were dropped.)

XMLHttpRequest supports every method, including CHICKEN, though some method names are matched against case-insensitively (methods are case-sensitive per HTTP) and some method names are not supported at all for security reasons (e.g. CONNECT).

Browsers are slowly converging on the rules specified by XMLHttpRequest, but as the other comment pointed out there are still some differences.