I'm guessing you never hit this issue then, but it's a real issue. Whether or not it's in the RFC as a hard limit it doesn't matter, no HTTP server will allow unlimited sized URIs.
You simply can't base64 large payloads and you're stuck with workarounds.
You are guessing wrong. Thanks, I know specific implementation will come with their limits. This will equally apply to QUERY body size and caching strategy.
Are we seriously ok with linking the RFC as source while providing a statement that doesn't match? RFC does matter.
The RFC does say "It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements."
One can infer from the RFC that you can reasonably expect many implementations to fail beyond 8000 characters, and that there are no guarantees up to that either.
True, the RFC doesn't specify a limit, but it does clearly indicate that it's not unbounded, nor should you expect it to be.
This RFC (10008) does not require caching to be implemented at all, so it would make no sense to make a recommendation here for what is a reasonable limit to expect caching to work.
Of course I don't advocate oversize URLs. That's a point of RFC10008.
Let's say we build a service for image transformation or image information extraction. Get isn't practical. QUERY with image as body could be a valid usage, regardless of caching. It conveys information that request is idempotent and can be retried with no impact on data, contrary to POST. If your http client is configured to support this, it can potentially improve reliability.
