What is the default form HTTP method?

Question

When an HTML form is submitted without specifying a method, what is the default HTTP method used? GET or POST?

Has this behaviour ever changed between HTML standard

Answer 1

(fuller answer, also about action and enctype)

The default 'method', 'action' and 'enctype' of an HTML form, if they are not specified,
are GET, current URL and application/x-www-form-urlencoded respectively.
(I.e., by default, a form requests current page with the inputted parameters.)

This behaviour has never changed, except 'action' (in HTML 4 it was required). Citations:

• 5 and subsequent, W3C TR

method: "The missing value default for the method attribute is... the GET state."
action:

The action of an element is the value of the element’s formaction attribute, if the element is a Submit Button and has such an attribute, or the value of its form owner’s action attribute, if it has one, or else the empty string. <...> If action is the empty string, let action be the document’s URL of the form document.

enctype: "The missing value default for the enctype attribute is... the application/x-www-form-urlencoded state."

• 4.0, W3C TR; 4.01, W3C TR

method: "Possible (case-insensitive) values are 'get' (the default) and 'post'."
action: no default, DTD requires it
enctype: "The default value for this attribute is 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'."

• 3.2, W3C TR

method: "It can be either GET or POST, and defaults to GET."
action: no explicit sentence, only in DTD
enctype: "It defaults to application/x-www-form-urlencoded."

• 2.0, RFC

method: no explicit sentence, only in DTD
action: "The action URI of a form defaults to the base URI of the document"
enctype: "The default encoding for all forms is `application/x-www-form-urlencoded'."