How to mark POSTing URLs?

Search engines and pre-fetching browser plugins can cause quite some trouble with <a> eleme开发者_高级运维nts where the destination page changes the state of the server. In a <form>, I'd mark it as modifying with method="POST". Is there a similar way to mark regular links as modifying?

rel="nofollow" does not solve the problem. From the specification:

By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines)

A plain old link can only make get requests. A get request, as you indicated, should not trigger any destructive changes.

The solution, if you can't or don't want to have a form in your page at that point, is to have the link point to a page that does have a form. For instance, if you have a "delete" link it might point to a page that says "Are you sure you want to delete X? [delete]".

Then, if you don't want people to have to leave the page every time they delete something, you can implement some AJAX functionality in JavaScript.