Series of posts on HTTP status codes (2018)

o11c|7 months ago

One of the most irritating bugs in client libraries is if they hard-code 1xx behavior to particular numbers, rather than treating the entire range uniformly.

This makes it easy to desync, though since it's not the server end it's rarely as catastrophic.

To fix this, servers need to start returning bogus 199 Fix Your Client headers before a random fraction of all real responses.

AriedK|7 months ago

I read the url as: ever t-pot, as a reference to 418. Turns out it's the author's actual name.

VoidWhisperer|7 months ago

Title should probably be updated to include the fact that this is from 2018 (relevant as this series has been completed as opposed to having just been started)

roywashere|7 months ago

Also, it is slightly outdated as it does not incorporate RFC9110 which renames some status codes which previously were WebDAV-only:

https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/117611

smartmic|7 months ago

Correct (and already done by now). Just a few days ago, there was the remarkable example that Cloudflare wants to use the code 402 (payment required) to keep AI crawlers away or ask them to pay. I still think it's a great idea, hopefully something will come of it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432385

Untit1ed|7 months ago

Dang these are much more useful than my first port of call for looking up http codes... which is http.cat/<code>. It's a shame you have to know what a code is to get to it... e.g. /404-not-found works instead of /404

dylan604|7 months ago

the MDN article on response codes is my default

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

You don't need to know the name. You can increment the URL directly as well

bravesoul2|7 months ago

https://evertpot.com/http/404

Seems to work :)

Sorry bad joke.

angra_mainyu|7 months ago

Always check MDN - for web stuff they truly are the best reference out there.

bravesoul2|7 months ago

It's a great idea to blog through a "mundane" thing like this. You learn alot and have an impetus and won't run out of ideas to blog. There is always another status code! You could do the same with other things. E.g. programming languages or whatever.

chuckadams|7 months ago

I thought I was conversant in HTTP status codes, even the WebDAV ones, but "226 IM Used" was a new one for me. I wonder why content negotiation wasn't sufficient for this?

12 comments