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Re: More on REST and HTTP status codes

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: More on REST and HTTP status codes
• From: ari@c... (K. Ari Krupnikov)
• Date: 06 Mar 2004 22:49:30 -0800
• In-reply-to: <404947FB.7060706@c...>
• References: <86znau3eg5.fsf@f...><DD06300A-6F1B-11D8-95ED-000A95A51C9E@t...><404947FB.7060706@c...>
• Sender: ari@f...
• User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3

"Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...> writes:

> Tim Bray wrote:
> > On Mar 5, 2004, at 6:19 PM, K. Ari Krupnikov wrote:
> >
> >> The question boils down to whether an HTTP URI is opaque or if the
> >> question mark has predefined semantics. (The specs would have me
> >> believe the former, but the practice seems to be the latter).
> > 404.  The URI is opaque.  There is no such resource.  -Tim
> 
> I don't think so. Rfc 2396 says
> 
> "The query component is a string of information to be interpreted by
>     the resource."
> 
> This shows that the query string is not actually part of the resource
> specification.

There is further support to this notion in the fact that relative URIs
are interpreted relative to the last slash before the "?"; all
slashes in the query string are ignored. If the document at
http://example.com/archives/lists/xml-dev?date=2004/03/06 contains a
link to "../newsgroups", I'd expect it to resolve to
http://example.com/archives/newsgroups. Tim, are you saying it should
resolve to http://example.com/archives/lists/xml-dev?date=2004/newsgroups

> In this case, there _is_ a resource, but there is nothing to return
> about the view (or whatever) of the resource indicated by the query
> string.
> 
> I think a better return would be a 204 -
> 
> 204 No Content

The server may wish to make a suggestion about other resource on it
has that may be of use. It may even say what it thinks the error was:
if you requested information on the 44th US president, the server may
tell you that the valid range is 1-43.

> An HTML or XML document saying there was no result and why would also
> seem to be OK, but 204 ought to be better.

I disagree. It's like saying 404 doesn't need a response body.

-- 
Elections only count as free and trials as fair if you can lose money
betting on the outcome.

• References:
  • More on REST and HTTP status codes
    • From: ari@c... (K. Ari Krupnikov)
  • Re: More on REST and HTTP status codes
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: More on REST and HTTP status codes
    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>

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