Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2018 December 23

= December 23 =

Super-URLs with HTTP headers?
An obvious deficiency in URLs is that they don't contain all the data to get to the desired page. For example, a New York Times page would often provide a useless result unless (I assume) it had the right referer string saying it came from a Google search. Also User-Agent and so forth so readers don't get dinged over a browser if they follow a link, etc. More generally, you can't properly point someone else to exactly what happened for debugging without all the information. Maybe even HTTP methods could be specified, though I'm not quite sure what would happen. ;) It occurs to me that this is the sort of deficiency that someone might have envisioned plugging in the glory days of the Web, before 9/11/01.  Did anyone ever establish some kind of super-url format standard with a syntax for listing any and all of the HTTP headers?  Alternatively, it should make a fine browser plug-in.  Anyone see such a thing? Wnt (talk) 02:53, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Are you familiar with http GET request? Ruslik_ Zero 18:22, 24 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Not as much as I should be, but so far as I know there is no "referer" or "user-agent" attribute for HTML forms. But that would be a great place to put some. Wnt (talk) 19:09, 24 December 2018 (UTC)