Re: Status of comment RC-2

On Sep 25, 2012, at 6:46 AM, Andy Seaborne wrote:

>> When we return error message their often quite verbose, and not
>> appropriate to fit in a status line. The longest recommended reason
>> phrase is 4 words long.
> 
> Agreed.

I was working on the assumption that the http status message often wouldn't include the full error, but a text summary of it.

> My understanding is that the proposal is to normatively describe a
> mechanism for passing back error messages.
> 
> It is not clear what for - as there is no definition of the error
> messages its not for a programme to parse out (a json structure would be
> easier anyway!) so I can only assume it's for display.  Existing servers (aside from specialied SPARQL endgines :-) send HTML by default.
> 

> So I don't see a proposal on the table at this point other than a vague "send text/plain in the body".  I think that is more harm than good to give it any weight.

Agreed (especially abotu json being easier). But I think we're past the point of standardizing on any of these more-useful formats, so my inclination was to not have any normative language regarding the response body format.

.greg