Safe and Idempotent Are Not Synonyms
Choose HTTP methods by safety and idempotency, not by English verb preference.
HTTP methods are a contract with every participant between the client and origin server. Safe methods tell crawlers, caches, SDKs, and retry logic that the request is intended for retrieval. Idempotent methods tell clients that repeating the same request has the same intended effect as sending it once. Those two properties matter more than which verb sounds natural in English. GET that changes a subscription violates the safe-method expectation even if the handler is easy to write. POST for a full replacement hides retry behavior that PUT would make explicit. The practical test is: if a mobile client times out…
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