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[Miles Sabin]
> Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote,
> > In Internet Explorer, it returns among other things,
> >
> > 11004 - Host not found
> >
> > Yes. I consider that a resolution. It made the
> > attempt and found a document to return.
>
> OK, suppose instead that you had a browser that hung indefinitely or
> crashed or exploded in similar circumstances. Is the hang or the crash
> or the explosion a "document" which would count as a result? If not,
> then why isn't the doc that IE renders for you just an IE
> implementation detail rather than something related to the
> (non-resolving) URI?
>
I think we have to remember that there is a difference between what a person
sees and consumes, and what a computer sees and consumes. The person sees
some message in IE and requires a semantic understanding to realize that
there was an error. Software, however, will receive a 404 or some other
http error, or possibly even a non-http response from the network, or
perhaps a socket error. Whatever the error, the software can learn that it
did not in fact get the requested resource.
In other words, if the the computer got back the text of the IE error
message, along with a 200 OK status code, I agree that it would think that
it had succesfully de-referenced the URI, but that would not be the case.
Cheers,
Tom P
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