Re: Reviving discussion on error code 451

On 17 December 2014 at 00:54, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 09:46:13AM +0100,
>  Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu> wrote
>  a message of 24 lines which said:
>
>> I'd turn the question the other way around : why pick a random code
>
> Is it a real question? Because 451 is not random
>
>     The novel Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature in Fahrenheit that author Ray Bradbury understood to be the autoignition point of paper.
>

Yes, 451 is not 'random' in the sense of 'chosen without meaning', but
it is 'random' in the sense of 'not following the previous pattern in
this context'. We're overloading the word random here pretty heavily.

My understanding of Willy's point (tell me if I'm off base here) is
that the fun literature in-joke of the status code being 451 don't
really justify choosing it. For the most part, HTTP status codes are
assigned in ascending order, and I see no reason to change that here.

Of course, for my part I don't care, because I treat the entire 4XX
block the same in my code, but I suspect others don't. Those users
would probably like us to keep some degree of rationality.

Received on Wednesday, 17 December 2014 09:13:28 UTC