[Web-SIG] Request and Response objects

[Thijs van der Vossen]

On Wednesday 05 November 2003 18:21, Steve Holden wrote:
> I agree it's desirable to have control over error handling, to the
> extent of providing a tailor-made page with the application's
> look-and-feel where appropriate. Errors will always occur, but the fact
> that it's a 404 is irrelevant to many users, and meaningless to even
> more. Sensible error messages would be better.

Yeah, but some of your users might not be human and they need the response 
code in the HTTP header to make sense of it all. ;-)

Examples of this include Google, who will happily index all pages where you 
don't send a 404 in the header and web service interfaces and aggregators who 
depend on the response code to do the right thing (see: 
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/07/21/atom_aggregator_behavior_http_level

And even something as simple as your web browser uses the 301 Permanent 
redirect to update your bookmarks. Any server-side web application api should 
surely have an easy way to set the response code yourself.

Regards,
Thijs

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