IETF Standardizes HTTP QUERY Method, Fixing Long-Standing API Data-Fetching Gap
The Internet Engineering Task Force has published RFC 10008, introducing QUERY as a new HTTP method and marking the first general-purpose HTTP method to reach standardization in years. The method was authored by engineers from Cloudflare and Akamai and addresses a longstanding limitation where developers had to choose between GET, which cannot carry a request body, and POST, which lacks safe and idempotent semantics. QUERY combines the cacheability and safety guarantees of GET with the ability to send a structured request body, such as JSON or GraphQL, similar to POST. It has been registered in the IANA HTTP Method Registry as both safe and idempotent, meaning HTTP clients, proxies, and caches can handle it correctly without custom configuration. The standard was formally published in June 2026 and is designed to eliminate the common workaround of misusing POST for read-only data queries in APIs.
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