HTTP 1.1 has a dizzying array of response codes. These are important. Designing APIs for the success case is easy; designing APIs for all the kinds of failures that can happen is hard. Mark has some excellent guidelines for aggregators handling various response codes.
100 101
200 201 202 203 204 205 206
300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307
400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408
409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417
500 501 502 503 504 505
I'm going to try 410 Gone to tell the spider to buzz off; that's stronger language than 404 and implies that the client should not try that URL again. But 410 Gone is not a HTTP/1.0 feature and the spider may not know HTTP/1.1, so it's possible I'm now out of spec. Isn't versioning distributed systems fun?
tech
  2003-08-03 16:09 Z