It's like SQL but with only SELECT and stored procedures

I've ranted on the brokenness of HTML the last time Bill brought up the subject, but now the it appears the damage is spreading.

Russell is rightly annoyed about all this, but he's rightly annoyed at the wrong things, the wrong people, and that's understandable given how we got here. I take the opposite view to Russ; not having mainstream availability of PUT and DELETE is the singularly most broken aspect of web technology today.

Let's go back. There is a broken spec in this story, but it's not Atom and and it's not HTTP. It's, wait for it... HTML. The reason technologies like SOAP and the Midp and Flash only use those verbs is because HTML only allowed POST and GET in forms. That's where the rot started. [Web Idiocy (PUT, POST, J2ME, Atom, and reliable messaging)]

and later on

Trust me, it's not an academic issue, and it's not limited to RM; basic content management is in scope too. For those of you that don't monkey about with HTTP for a living, I can sum up the problem of the problem of not having PUT and DELETE like this - imagine dealing with a subset of SQL that doesn't suppport UPDATE and DELETE or Java Collections that didn't have an add() method. It's an insanely stupid way of working. But if you never knew SQL had UPDATE to begin with, and it was useful, perhaps that wouldn't be as apparent.

The irony is, that while some of us are left to compromizing with the fallout from uninformed specs, a number of people think that PUT and DELETE are some sort of esoterica that only a spec wonk could care about. And now, over on the Atom list some people are talking about workarounds. To heck with that. Get Sun to fix the Midp and the W3C TAG to fix HTML/XForms. The latter is worth emphasizing - as far as I can tell, this issue isn't even on the TAG's radar.

Emphasis mine.

Here is the part that irks me, the XForms working group was told that missing DELETE was a problem, even PUT was under discussion. I submitted feedback on a draft 7 months before XForms became a recommendation, only to be ignored. Now that the groups is setting their charter for their 1.1 work, I've submitted the same item. I can only assume I'll be ignored again. Of course, I don't expect much from this group, remember, these are the same people that tried to deprecate GET. Yes, you read that correctly, they wanted to deprecate GET in forms, an issue that had to rise to the level of the TAG before getting resolved, resulting in the TAG finding URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET and POST.

Oh, and if you're thinking, "Just use SOAP", please read carefully the warning signs being raised.