html - How do you force a web browser to use POST when getting a url?

Question

How do you force a web browser to use POST when getting a url?

Answer 1

Use an HTML form that specifies post as the method:

<form method="post" action="/my/url/">
    ...
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit using POST" />
</form>

If you had to make it happen as a link (not recommended), you could have an onclick handler dynamically build a form and submit it.

<script type="text/javascript">
function submitAsPost(url) {
    var postForm = document.createElement('form');
    postForm.action = url;
    postForm.method = 'post';
    var bodyTag = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
    bodyTag.appendChild(postForm);
    postForm.submit();
}
</script>
<a href="/my/url" onclick="submitAsPost(this.href); return false;">this is my post link</a>

If you need to enforce this on the server side, you should check the HTTP method and if it's not equal to POST, send an HTTP 405 response code (method not allowed) back to the browser and exit. Exactly how you implement that will depend on your programming language/framework, etc.