Are the PUT DELETE HEAD etc methods available in most web browsers

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 jmeter-user jakarta apache org 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

User · Answer

Just to add - Safari 2 and earlier definitely didn t support PUT and DELETE   I get the impression 3 did  but I don t have it around to test anymore   Safari 4 definitely does support PUT and DELETE

User · Answer

No  The HTML 5 spec mentions      The method and formmethod content attributes are enumerated attributes   with the following keywords and states       The keyword get  mapping to the state GET  indicating the HTTP GET   method  The GET method should only request and retrieve data and   should have no other effect        The keyword post  mapping to the state   POST  indicating the HTTP POST method  The POST method requests that   the server accept the submitted form s data to be processed  which may   result in an item being added to a database  the creation of a new web   page resource  the updating of the existing page  or all of the   mentioned outcomes       The keyword dialog  mapping to the state dialog  indicating that   submitting the form is intended to close the dialog box in which the   form finds itself  if any  and otherwise not submit        The invalid value default for these attributes is the GET state   I e  HTML forms  only support GET and POST as HTTP request methods  A workaround for this is to tunnel other methods through POST by using a hidden form field which is read by the server and the request dispatched accordingly   However  GET  POST  PUT and DELETE are supported by the implementations of XMLHttpRequest  i e  AJAX calls  in all the major web browsers  IE  Firefox  Safari  Chrome  Opera

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I believe those comments refer specifically to the browsers  i e   clicking links and submitting forms  not XMLHttpRequest  XMLHttpRequest is just a custom client that you wrote in JavaScript that uses the browser as a runtime   UPDATE  To clarify  I did not mean  though I did write  that you wrote XMLHttpRequest  I meant that you wrote the code that uses XMLHttpRequest  The browsers do not natively support XMLHttpRequest  XMLHttpRequest comes from the JavaScript runtime  which may be hosted by a browser  although it isn t required to be  see Rhino   That s why people say browsers don t support PUT and DELETE   because it s actually JavaScript that is supporting them

User · Answer

YES  PUT  DELETE  HEAD etc HTTP methods are available in all modern browsers   To be compliant with XMLHttpRequest Level 2 browsers must support these methods  To check which browsers support XMLHttpRequest Level 2 I recommend CanIUse   http   caniuse com  feat xhr2  Only Opera Mini is lacking support atm  juli  15   but Opera Mini lacks support for everything

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XMLHttpRequest is a standard object in the JavaScript Object model    According to Wikipedia  XMLHttpRequest first appeared in Internet Explorer 5 as an ActiveX object  but has since been made into a standard and has been included for use in JavaScript in the Mozilla family since 1 0  Apple Safari 1 2  Opera 7 60-p1  and IE 7 0   The open   method on the object takes the HTTP Method as an argument - and is specified as taking any valid HTTP method  see the item number 5 of the link  - including GET  POST  HEAD  PUT and DELETE  as specified by RFC 2616   As a side note IE 7   8 only permit the following HTTP methods   GET    POST    HEAD    PUT    DELETE    MOVE    PROPFIND    PROPPATCH    MKCOL    COPY    LOCK    UNLOCK   and  OPTIONS

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

method hidden field workaround  Used in Rails and could be adapted to any framework    add a hidden  method parameter to any form that is not GET or POST    lt input type  hidden  name   method  value  DELETE  gt    This can be done automatically in frameworks through the HTML creation helper method  e g  Rails form tag  fix the actual form method to POST   lt form method  post   processes  method on the server and do exactly as if that method had been sent instead of the actual POST   Rationale   history of why it is not possible  https   softwareengineering stackexchange com questions 114156 why-there-are-no-put-and-delete-methods-in-html-forms

[http] Are the PUT, DELETE, HEAD, etc methods available in most web browsers?

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