Re: Proposal: 205 Bodies [#88]

On Jun 8, 2009, at 4:58 PM, Javier Godoy wrote:
> Julian Reschke wrote:
>
>> Adrien de Croy wrote:
>>> Since 205 is for resetting a form, and since therefore it's  
>>> intended audience is browsers, and since there's no apparent  
>>> browser support for it, perhaps 205 should go the way of 305.
>>> ...
>>
>> Perhaps. Otherwise we probably should think about why it's not  
>> implemented. Maybe it isn't sufficiently clear from the  
>> description what it's good for?
>>
> IMHO the description is clear, but it is not implemented because it  
> doesn't give feedback to the user, thus it wouldn't be used.

I think it was assumed that the user agent will provide whatever
feedback is appropriate, according to the nature of that user agent.

> Suppose a website returns 205 after successful form submissions. If  
> user-agents implement 205 as specified in section 10.2.6 (i.e.  
> "SHOULD reset the document view"), the human users will find that  
> after clicking the submit button, the form is suddenly blanked, and  
> they may think their submission didn't complete.
>
> This feature is better realized by returning an entity with 200  
> status, containing the same (reseted) form, and a message such as  
> "submission successful, please enter more data" (not to mention  
> using AJAX and similar approaches).  On the other hand, 205  
> responses may be useful if the server will interact with purpose- 
> specific clients, because these clients may implement the user  
> notification by their own.
>
> BTW, I found interesting that HTTP cares about presentation issues...

It doesn't -- HTTP cares about not re-transmitting the bytes of a
document that the user already has in front of them.  I don't
remember who requested the status code, but I do know it was for
data-entry forms that are expected to be submitted repeatedly.

I have no objection to deprecating 205 if nobody implements it,
but that would be a different issue.

....Roy

Received on Monday, 8 June 2009 15:49:28 UTC