Question

I’m working with some HTML forms and I just want to know if it is okay to use a URL parameters in the action attribute even if the method attribute is POST?

<form action="index.php?somefield=someval" method="post">
    <input name="anotherfield" value="anothervalue" type="text" />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>

Well, this works fine, I can get all fields and their values in my postback page but I want to know if I’m breaking some rules, standard or something by doing this? Please, if you can, show some resource that can prove it is okay because I can’t find it in W3.org.

Answer 1

As the specifications RFC1866 section 8.2.3 states that:

If the service associated with the processing of a form has side
effects (for example, modification of a database or subscription to a
service), the method should be ‘POST’.

To process a form whose action URL is an HTTP URL and whose method is
‘POST’, the user agent conducts an HTTP POST transaction using the
action URI, and a message body of type ‘application/x-www-form-
urlencoded’ format as above. The user agent should display the
response from the HTTP POST interaction just as it would display the
response from an HTTP GET above.

When sending a POST request, the form data is actually sent in the body of the request, not in the header. So the request URL (the form’s action) is different from the request body.

The data sent to the server in the background looks like this:

POST /path/script.php?somefield=somevar HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: User-Agent-String/1.0
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 32

home=Cosby&favorite+flavor=flies