Re:HTTP 402: Payment Required
by jerf on Saturday February 01, 2020 @09:27PM
(#22214758)
Yes; the idea behind 406 and the whole content negotiation thing seemed to be that clients and servers would somehow notice they didn't negotiate a common representation and then do "something" sensible in response to that, not that it would be essentially treated no differently from any other 4xx error.
Quite a lot of the web would just ignore the mismatch and serve the resource up anyhow with whatever Content-Type the server wanted, and, honestly, that seems to work OK.
It's not that it may not be an error in some sense, it's that the standard has this rich set of specific errors that seems as if it's coming from some parallel universe where the web evolved much differently. And it's not that there is no overlap with our real universe, it's just that if you read the standard and kind of do a postmodernism-style analysis of what the authors must have thought was important, what you get doesn't much resemble the real-world web of today. Or in the case of HTTP 1.1, even the real world web of the time.
Quite a lot of the web would just ignore the mismatch and serve the resource up anyhow with whatever Content-Type the server wanted, and, honestly, that seems to work OK.
It's not that it may not be an error in some sense, it's that the standard has this rich set of specific errors that seems as if it's coming from some parallel universe where the web evolved much differently. And it's not that there is no overlap with our real universe, it's just that if you read the standard and kind of do a postmodernism-style analysis of what the authors must have thought was important, what you get doesn't much resemble the real-world web of today. Or in the case of HTTP 1.1, even the real world web of the time.