IETF Publishes New HTTP QUERY Method After Five Years of Development
The IETF has released RFC 10008, a new HTTP method called QUERY that allows safe, idempotent complex queries with caching support, ending the workaround of using POST.
This article was drafted with AI assistance from multiple sources and was reviewed and approved by a human editor before publication.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published RFC 10008 on July 13, 2026, defining a new HTTP request method named QUERY. The specification, co-authored by engineers from Cloudflare and Akamai with contributions from German internet engineering firm greenbytes, has been under development since 2021.
QUERY is designed to be both safe and idempotent, meaning it does not modify server state and repeated identical requests produce the same result. This allows HTTP intermediaries such as proxies, content delivery networks, and browsers to cache responses to complex queries that include a request body. According to Elie Treport, "Thanks to QUERY, we finally have functional HTTP caching for complex requests."
The new method addresses a longstanding gap: GET requests are safe and idempotent but cannot carry a body, making them impractical for large or structured queries. POST requests can include a body but are neither safe nor idempotent, preventing caching and safe retries. QUERY combines the body capability with explicit read-only semantics.
Adoption will take time. The HTML forms standard currently supports only GET and POST; the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is working on an update to include QUERY. Open source developer Daniele Teti expects a gradual rollout: "server-side and dev tools first, then frameworks, then browsers and JS APIs." Node.js is adding QUERY support in its HTTP module, the Go programming language can already send custom HTTP methods including QUERY, and the PHP framework Laravel is already ingesting QUERY requests.
Widespread ecosystem support will require updates to many components, including reverse proxies, load balancers, CDNs, API gateways, firewalls, and web frameworks.