Re: Reviving discussion on error code 451

Uh, 410: “The requested resource is no longer available at the server and
no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered
permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references
to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know, or has
no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the
status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead. This response is
cacheable unless indicated otherwise.”

Are you seriously suggesting that 410 is appropriate?  I’m trying not to
find this suggestion offensive, but having difficulty.

What you refer to as “all the legal hooha” is exactly the point: They wish
to report breakage, and it’s good engineering discipline to provide
high-quality, informative, diagnostics in the case of breakage. So when the
breakage is legal there should be a way to say so. The way I would go about
ameliorating breakage is entirely different for 401, 403, 404, and 5XX; and
would be different again for 451.

Legal obstacles are a cause of internet breakage which are empirically
observed to occur, and as protocol designers we should include them in our
diagnostic repertoire.

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com> wrote:
>
>  Hi Tim,
>
>
> On 12/18/14, 4:01 AM, Tim Bray wrote:
>
>
>  On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 2:24 PM, Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>  Is there a recommended action that a client would programmatically
>> take?  Absent such an action what is the benefit over a 404?   Is the
>> intent to route around the failure?
>>
>
>  There are a variety of things a client could do, ranging from styles of
> visual display to looking for alternate paths to the desired resource. Also
> it depends what kind of client you’re talking about; I’m more interested in
> the applications for robot/crawler style clients.
>
>  But I think that’s perhaps the wrong question to be asking.  We have
> heard it asserted by several parties that they would like to have a
> standardized way to report the status when legal demands force them to deny
> access to a resource.  I’m not sure it’s appropriate for us to tell them
> that they shouldn’t want this.  And I think that unless it damages the
> Internet, in general we should strive to give service providers what they
> want.
>
>
> Disagree.  Nobody should just get something because they want something.
> And to determine whether it damages the Internet one needs to have at least
> some view as to what the semantic intent is.  And so my point is that your
> draft is a bit too cryptic about how the status code will be used.  How
> will this help the Internet?  What is the benefit over 410, which doesn't
> have all the legal hooha?
>
> Eliot
>
>
>
>

-- 
- Tim Bray (If you’d like to send me a private message, see
https://keybase.io/timbray)