[thelist] GET requests and sent content

[Kasimir K]

> I have been told 
> by the very knowledgable lead developer that normal form get and post 
> requests also send back the entire html of the page they are on and 
> hence they use JS to minimize the size of the sent data.

Untrue. What is sent is a "form data set" which "is a sequence of 
control-name/current-value pairs constructed from successful controls". 
Controls are the form input fields.

>  This to me seems ludicrous. My understanding is that the browser 
> packages the request and simply sends back the form data to the server. 

True.

> Can anyone via actual reference confirm or deny my suspicions about the 
> browser GET / POST system???

This tells you how forms are submitted:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.13

And here you'll find more deteails on HTTP requests:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec5.html#sec5


hth,
.k