Proxies changing POST to GET?

Marc H. (march@thetics.europa.com)
Tue, 20 Dec 1994 09:19:00 -0800 (PST)

I've been putting together a CGI Programmer's Reference at
<URL:http://www.halcyon.com/hedlund/cgi-faq/>. As part of the project,
I've been collecting information on characteristics of various browsers;
specifically, the environment variables they pass to CGI scripts. I have
one CGI script that figures out if I've heard from the user's browser,
and if not, allows them to submit a form to another script, which mails
me a list of the environment variables it receives. The form, using
"method='post'" contains one input tag, which asks for the email address
of the submitter.

On two occasions now, I've gotten a response that lists REQUEST_METHOD =
GET, with the user's email address in QUERY_STRING. In both cases,
HTTP_USER_AGENT has indicated that the submitter was working through a
proxy. Is there any reason why a proxy would convert "method='post'" to
"mathod='get'"?

The browsers and proxies were:
* ATSON-W3LM/1.0-beta libwww/2.17+cocoa modified via proxy
gateway CERN-HTTPD/3.0 libwww/2.17
* NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System/2.4 libwww/2.12 modified
via proxy gateway CERN-HTTPD/3.0pre6 libwww/2.16 beta

Thanks for your help.

M. Hedlund