When issuing an HTTP DELETE request, the request URI should completely identify the resource to delete. However, is it allowable to add extra meta-data as part of the entity body of the request?
The spec does not explicitly forbid or discourage it, so I would tend to say it is allowed.
Microsoft sees it the same way (I can hear murmuring in the audience), they state in the MSDN article about the DELETE Method of ADO.NET Data Services Framework:
If a DELETE request includes an entity body, the body is ignored [...]
Additionally here is what RFC2616 (HTTP 1.1) has to say in regard to requests:
Content-Length
or Transfer-Encoding
header (section 4.3)For responses, this has been defined: