On the SitePoint PHP Blog today Troels Knak-Nielsen takes a deeper look at two of the superglobals a lot of PHP developers take for granted - $_GET and $_POST.

When a PHP script is invoked by a web server, it is as the result of a HTTP request. A HTTP request has a target URI and that URI consists of different parts. One of these parts is the query. As the PHP process starts up, the query gets parsed into an associative array. And for some reason, somebody decided on the unfortunate $_GET, because it's what you use for GET requests - right? Wrong!

He points out that all HTTP requests, regardless if they're GET or POST will have that GET information (not necessarily in $_GET, though). He also mentions another commonly used (and sometimes abused) superglobal - $_FILES. His biggest gripe, though, is that the naming of the variables confuses the developer as to the true content of the HTTP request.

And I won't even comment on the nastiness of $_REQUEST.