The HTTP QUERY Method (RFC 10008)

[jeswr]

Specification: The HTTP QUERY Method — RFC 10008 (IETF HTTP WG, Proposed Standard; IANA-registered, safe + idempotent): https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc10008.html

QUERY is a safe, idempotent, cacheable HTTP method carrying a request body whose content defines the query — the missing middle between GET (no body, URL-length-bound) and POST-as-read (unsafe, uncacheable).

Web-facing surface:

• Scripted requests already work — fetch(url, { method: 'QUERY', body }) and XHR send QUERY (it is neither a Fetch forbidden nor a normalized method).
• Declarative forms — <form method="query"> falls back to GET today, dropping the body (Support QUERY method in form submissions whatwg/html#12594).
• HTTP cache — RFC 10008 §2.7 makes a QUERY response cacheable with a key that incorporates the request content. We tested current Chrome and Firefox: both cache GET, but neither caches a repeated identical QUERY — so this is unimplemented, not already solved.
• Accept-Query — a response header advertising supported query media types (§3).
• CORS — QUERY is intentionally not CORS-safelisted, so a cross-origin QUERY requires a preflight (by design; no safelist change requested).

Emerging implementations: Node.js undici (nodejs/undici#5459, with a body-aware cache key), Eclipse Jetty (jetty/jetty.project#15316), Apache Tomcat (apache/tomcat#1026); and the W3C Linked Web Storage protocol is adopting QUERY for its search / type-index (w3c/lws-protocol#179).

We would value a WebKit position, and any concerns (e.g. on the §2.7 cache-key model), to guide the WHATWG Fetch/HTML work and signal implementer interest. Not requesting an immediate ship.

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Companion requests: mozilla/standards-positions#1430 (Mozilla position) and whatwg/fetch#1938 (Fetch integration).

Part of a broader RFC 10008 adoption effort: https://github.com/jeswr/http-query-adoption

[annevk]

Could you please file this again using the template. Our tooling cannot handle custom formatting.

[moonmeister]

I've re-filed this using the template as requested. #709