Re: Status indicating intermediary server problems

"non-fatal" necessarily? Or any error in a node that knows it is an
intermediary one?
On Sep 26, 2014 1:56 PM, "Andreas Tolfsen" <ato@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 4:16 PM, Simon Stewart
> <simon.m.stewart@gmail.com> wrote:
> > From the end user's point of view, what's the difference? And how is this
> > different from a normal HTTP request where a proxy chokes? As far as each
> > step on the path from local to remote end goes, the "next hop" _is_ the
> > remote end, so it'd be hard for an intermediary to know whether or not
> the
> > problem was caused by the remote end failing to respond or another node?
> >
> > Would a 502 or 504 HTTP response be appropriate?
>
> An intermediary might perform other actions than just act as a proxy,
> or the proxy itself may have bugs.  It's sometimes useful to catch
> errors and propagate them on to the local end in a structured way.
>
> An HTTP status code will communicate the type of error that occurred,
> but sometimes it might be useful to convey more information: Exception
> messages, stacktraces, &c.  WebDriver's response object [1] is good
> for this purpose but none of the existing status codes [2] makes sense
> when non-fatal errors occur.
>
> But including a mandate on a special HTTP status code makes a lot of sense
> too.
>
> 1.
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webdriver/raw-file/tip/webdriver-spec.html#response
> 2.
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webdriver/raw-file/tip/webdriver-spec.html#status-codes
>
>