Support for Various HTTP Methods on the Web

TL;DR

This study evaluates the support for different HTTP methods across a large sample of web services, revealing high support for GET and POST but very limited support for methods like PUT, PATCH, and DELETE.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on the actual support for various HTTP methods in real-world web services, highlighting gaps in support for less common methods.

Findings

55% of URIs support GET and POST methods

Less than 2% support PUT, PATCH, or DELETE methods

Most web services do not support all HTTP methods.

Abstract

We examine how well various HTTP methods are supported by public web services. We sample 40,870 live URIs from the DMOZ collection (a curated directory of World Wide Web URIs) and found that about 55% URIs claim support (in the Allow header) for GET and POST methods, but less than 2% of the URIs claim support for one or more of PUT, PATCH, or DELETE methods.