Why do we need anything more than HTTP GET, PUT, POST?

Question

What is the practical benefit of using HTTP GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, HEAD? Why not focus on their behavioral benefits (safety and idempotency), forgetting their names, and use GE

Answer 1

HEAD is really useful for determining what a given server's clock is set to (accurate to within the 1 second or the network round-trip time, whichever is greater). It's also great for getting Futurama quotes from Slashdot:

~$ curl -I slashdot.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:35:13 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005001227
X-Fry: That's a chick show. I prefer programs of the genre: World's Blankiest Blank.
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

For cURL, -I is the option for performing a HEAD request. To get the current date and time of a given server, just do

curl -I $server | grep ^Date