welcome http query

In 2026, after a 16 years pause, HTTP gained a new keyword QUERY. Much has been said and said about the GET with a body. But why did it take so long?

Agreement not implementation

I'll share a secret: QUERY has been supported by HTTP for a long time. So has HTTP UNIVERSE or HTTP TANGO The protocol doesn't care for the keyword. Your client an server care. HTTP GET can't contain a body - nonsense. Of course it can. And you can expect, unless you control both sides, that it will fail in one way or another.

So the IETF standards are the etiquette of interaction, not the laws. They are the gentlemen agreement stating "If we both follow the RFC, we can have the reasonable expectation that this exchange of information could work".

Hammering out agreements that don't break previous ones it time consuming and tedious, especially in venerable, foundational standards like http. just see how time tested the standards surrounding http are:

Standards

Method	Standardized	Document
GET	1991	HTTP/0.9
GET, HEAD, POST	1996	RFC 1945
OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, CONNECT	1997	RFC 2068
	refined 1999	(HTTP/1.1) RFC 2616
PATCH	2010	RFC 5789
Summarized HTTP semantics	2022	RFC 9110
QUERY	2026	RFC 10008

Extensions

Extension	Since	Document	Methods added
WebDAV (core)	1999	RFC 2518	PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, MKCOL, COPY, MOVE, LOCK, UNLOCK
	revised 2007	RFC 4918
DeltaV (versioning)	2002	RFC 3253	CHECKOUT, CHECKIN, VERSION-CONTROL, REPORT, MERGE, …
Ordered Collections	2003	RFC 3648	ORDERPATCH
ACL (Access Control List)	2004	RFC 3744	ACL
CalDAV (calendaring)	2007	RFC 4791	MKCALENDAR
SEARCH	2008	RFC 5323	SEARCH
BIND (bindings)	2010	RFC 5842	BIND, UNBIND, REBIND
CardDAV (contacts)	2011	RFC 6352	(reuses WebDAV methods)

The WebDAV SEARCH method (2008) was the early inspiration for QUERY — drafts even used the name SEARCH before the working group settled on QUERY to avoid the WebDAV baggage and map cleanly onto the URI query component.

HTTP anything

Don't believe HTTP TANGO would work? Just clone my little fun project, run it and open the developer tools to watch the network.
Works, since it controls both ends.

Tooling needs to catch up

Now QUERY is a standard, tooling needs to catch up. Enums need extension and adjacent standards updated. E.g OpenAPI 3.x has no provision for new HTTP syntax, while Bruno and curl do just fine.

As usual YMMV