phil ringnalda

I’m not a designer. You might have noticed that, if you’ve ever seen, well, any HTML page I’ve ever done. I appreciate what they do, really I do, but my lack of even a shred of design talent sometimes makes me a bit unsympathetic to their desire to have what seems like their every whim satisfied, no matter what.

It looks like the fallout from web app designers, especially those using Rails, using GET when they should use POST so that they can style the widget the user clicks to perform an action, will be that they’ll have an easy way of using JavaScript to tunnel their looks-like-a-GET link through POST.

Apparently in all the rush to read Section 9.1 of RFC 2616 and to misinterpret the meaning of SHOULD NOT, nobody is actually reading the part of Section 9.1 that says

This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested.

The link

Launch The Nuclear Warheads

should go to a page which includes the button

Making the fire alarm look just like a light switch isn’t an example of daring and innovative design, it’s just dangerous. Pushing the table out of the way won’t keep you from falling off the chair.