Re: Feedback on the ping="" attribute (ISSUE-1)

2007/11/12, Geoffrey Sneddon:
>
> If you were to ask a normal person a question such
> as, "What's the importance of using a POST request not a GET request
> in HTTP?" (the least technical way to question this as far as I can
> see, as the petrol/diesel metaphor relies on people knowing what the
> two are as well), you'd get answers including:
>
> - "Huh?" (from a guy who has been around developers for years, but is
> not a developer himself)
> - "Security? Reliability?" (from a software developer, who has had one
> or two things to do with HTTP over the years)
> - "emm i really have no clue either sorry" (from a 15/16 year old
> British school pupil)

- "with POST, you can hide parameters, so you can force users to use
*your* HTML form" / "...so people can't bookmark the page and you can
then force them to start from your front-page" (from "newbies", that's
something I read a hundred times something like 7 years ago on forums
but I doubt it has changed much since then)

> Nobody really knows the importance of either. Some software developers
> have little clue, yet alone normal users.

I totally agree: many of my collegues (all software developers) don't
really know how HTTP caches work, some junior developers don't even
know much either about HTTP status codes (apart from 404 and 500,
sometimes 401 and 403, 302; they rarely even understand the difference
between 301, 302, 303 and 307) and don't really understand what
"disconnected protocol" mean; yet some of them develop Web apps.

-- 
Thomas Broyer

Received on Monday, 12 November 2007 21:30:21 UTC