[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
"Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@comcast.net> 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.
|
