Ajax is not the only way to access a web service.
> 404s are a different matter because you'd get 404 pages
…which are returned with a status code of 404. That's where the name comes from. Non-200 status codes were ubiquitous even back then.
> It doesn't mean developers understood what to return from an ajax call, or that they understood HTTP verbs.
Ajax is irrelevant and we're talking about status codes, not verbs.
> I'll remind you again that it was actually fairly hard to return the correct codes from a lot of frameworks, so objective facts are at odds with your recollection of events.
Perhaps the technology _you_ were using made it difficult, but it certainly wasn't the general case. PHP, classic ASP, mod\_perl, mod\_python, CGI scripts… they could all respond with non-200 status codes easily. Which ones are you thinking of that made it difficult?
> Here are some examples from 2008 of developers on SO discussing things which seem obvious today:
Come on man, clueless questions get asked about extremely well established things on Stack Overflow every single day. That doesn't mean that those concepts are suddenly no longer well understood, it just means that the person asking is a beginner. And neither of those questions mentioned status codes at all!
404s are a different matter because you'd get 404 pages, so it's not at all an argument to support your position. It doesn't mean developers understood what to return from an ajax call, or that they understood HTTP verbs.
I'll remind you again that it was actually fairly hard to return the correct codes from a lot of frameworks, so objective facts are at odds with your recollection of events.
I stick by my assertion that the vast majority of web developers in our industry didn't really understand http until the latter half of the 2000s. I also specifically remember presentations to all our developers both junior and senior of how browser caching worked, which to most developers at the time was a bit of a mystery, and the correct headers to return to control it.
Here are some examples from 2008 of developers on SO discussing things which seem obvious today:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/165779/are-the-put-delete... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/165720/how-to-debug-restf...