It seems to me that these discussions produce far more heat than light. If one needs to build an application, what is the benefit to sweating these details to such an extent? I don't mean to denigrate any of the fine work that's gone to figuring out these standards. But if the application and/or API works well, what difference does it make whether it uses post or put? I honestly would like to be enlightened. Is the motivation to make it so that people will know how api's work without reading about them, because they conform to a clear standard that everyone understands? If so, that hardly seems achievable. So I've honestly been long perplexed why people sweat this type of thing so hard.
My mobile client is consuming your API over a lossy and high latency network. Some of my requests will time out. Sometimes I will drop offline after sending a request and not be able to receive the response. Which requests can I retry safely?
For day to day coding, I don't think they're that important. But if you're building/extending/supporting a framework that hundreds or thousands of developers may use, it's good to have clarity on these issues.
