- From: Clemm, Geoff <gclemm@rational.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 17:55:48 -0500
- To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
If you knew that all of your clients will just display the literal string "404- Not Found" whenever they receive a 404 status (and they don't try to display the response body), then you'd be tempted to compose a nice error message page, and return 200 to avoid the poor 404 behavior of your clients. This is the "dumb client workaround" approach. Note that I do not advocate this approach, since that makes your web site perform poorly with smart clients, but I think we should acknowledge that there are situations where violating the protocol in this way produces a better user experience. To repeat though, this is not something I advocate, and it violates the protocol. Cheers, Geoff -----Original Message----- From: Julian Reschke [mailto:julian.reschke@gmx.de] Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 5:18 PM To: Clemm, Geoff; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org Subject: RE: WebDAV and 404-handling > From: w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org > [mailto:w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Clemm, Geoff > Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 7:12 PM > To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org > Subject: RE: WebDAV and 404-handling > > > > Currently, there is no standard WebDAV content for a 404 > body, so you can replace that body without violating > the WebDAV standard. Probably the safest thing to do is to > only substitute the error page if the 404-body is > empty. > > I do see a tension here between what the server would > want to do for a "dumb" client (that just knows how to > render html, and does nothing interesting with status > codes) and what it would do for a "smart" client. I > personally agree with Julian and Lisa that in these cases, > the needs of the smart client should take precedence, and > the correct error code (404) should be returned. I don't understand this statement. If the resource was not found, return HTTP status 404. If you want to send descriptive text, do so, but do *not* change the status code. That would be a bug, and I really don't understand what it's good for. Julian -- <green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760
Received on Thursday, 16 January 2003 17:56:19 UTC