Re: Status indicating intermediary server problems

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

Received on Friday, 26 September 2014 20:56:32 UTC