HTTP status codes when no result is responded

Hi all!

I recently sent a message to the public-LOD group where I got the pointer
to better place this here directly. I quickly went through the draft at
http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/docs/protocol-1.1/ and found nothing about
the usage of HTTP status code 204, so I repeat my observation here:

Since on the LDOW11 and USEWOD workshops at WWW there was the recent
discussion about using HTTP referrers properly when browsing, crawling
etc. linked data (short using it) I would like to add another thing that I
was wondering about. If endpoints deliver no content to the client e.g. if
the client performs a SPARQL query that yields no results, servers answer
HTTP status code 200 and deliver some content that holds the information
that there were no results. As far as I see, there is the HTTP status code
204 for exactly this, isn't it? (see
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html)

So, beside the aforementioned and recently discussed proper usage of
referrers, I would also suggest to use the 204 HTTP status code.

Cheers,
Markus


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Markus Luczak-Rösch (Dipl.-Inform.)| Freie Universität Berlin
Lecturer/Grad. Research Associate  | Dept. of Computer Science
Networked Information Systems WG   | Königin-Luise-Str. 24/26
                                   | D-14195 Berlin
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www.ag-nbi.de                      | Phone: +49 30 838 75226
www.markus-luczak.de               | luczak@inf.fu-berlin.de
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Received on Friday, 1 April 2011 08:42:39 UTC