back to <FORM METHOD="...">

What is Actually Sent with Each Form Method

The requests that are sent to the web server using GET and POST are not actually much different. These two requests show the small differences between the two:

GET

GET /cgi-bin/maillist.cgi?realname=Kevin+Burris&email=kevin@idocs.com HTTP/1.0
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, */*
Referer: http://www.idocs.com/tags/foo.html
Accept-Language: en
UA-pixels: 640x480
UA-color: color8
UA-OS: Windows 95
UA-CPU: x86
User-Agent: Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.0; Windows 95)
Host: 10.10.10.20
Connection: Keep-Alive

POST

POST /cgi-bin/maillist.cgi HTTP/1.0
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, */*
Referer: http://www.idocs.com/tags/foo.html
Accept-Language: en
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
UA-pixels: 640x480
UA-color: color8
UA-OS: Windows 95
UA-CPU: x86
User-Agent: Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.0; Windows 95)
Host: 10.10.10.20
Content-Length: 44
Pragma: No-Cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
realname=Kevin+Burris&email=kevin@idocs.com

Both methods in this example use Url Encoding. The encoding type used is set with the attribute <FORM ENCTYPE="...">.

About the Author
Copyright 1997-2002 Idocs Inc. Content in this guide is offered freely to the public under the terms of the Open Content License and the Open Publication License. Contents may be redistributed or republished freely under these terms so long as credit to the original creator and contributors is maintained.