
Ask HN: What would you think of a new HTTP method named PREVIEW? - slowmotarget
With the success of Open Graph, lots and lots of HTTP GET requests are sent every day to process only a few &lt;meta&gt; in the &lt;head&gt; of HTML pages.<p>I believe that this process could be lightened by the adoption of a new HTTP verb. By sending an HTTP PREVIEW &#x2F;mypage we could leverage caching and write optimized database queries to return a light, serialized response for crawlers and bots.
======
detaro
Why wouldn't this just be a new Content-Type to request?

~~~
slowmotarget
If this behavior is to be implemented through request headers, I'd prefer not
to mess with Content-Type because it may be needed in the request: you could
still want to PREVIEW but ask for a preferred content-type, like text/xml or
application/json

~~~
detaro
It IMHO doesn't make sense to ask for "give me a preview as any JSON" \-
rather, you'd want a specific JSON based format for preview information (be it
oEmbed-json, some json-serialization of og:-style data, jf2, ...), and thus
want to ask for a content type specific to that.

Also, from a practical perspective: that approach is easy to implement by
using existing tech. Attempting to introduce a new HTTP method is almost
guaranteed to fail, both on a technical (getting support into all the things
that process HTTP along the way) and the political (actually getting it in a
standard) level.

