Error Reporting Format

[James M Snell <jasnell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thus far, this WG has not agreed on any error reporting format for APP 
operations.  At this point it appears clear that we're likely not going 
to have one.  However, in our implementation, we'd still like to be able 
to return error reports that clients will be able to do something with 
in an interoperable way.  Therefore, I'd like to take a quick opinion poll.

Note: I'm NOT making any proposals for changes to the draft!  I just 
want to ask the WG members for some opinions about which error reporting 
approach they think would be best to support interop.

Our server implementation will return some basic error reporting 
information back to the user in addition to the http status code.  This 
report will include localized error descriptions and 
application/condition specific codes (e.g. differentiating different 
types of 500 responses, explaining   403 responses, etc).

The options are to:

a) return a simple custom xml format, e.g.
    <error>
      <code>1234</code>
      <description>Disk full</description>
      <workaround>Contact your admin at admin@xxxxxxxxxxx</workaround>
    </error>

b) return an xhtml-based format, e.g.

    <div class="error">
      <span class="code">1234</span>
      <span class="description">Disk full</span>
      <span class="workaround">Contact your sys admin at ...</span>
    </div>

c) return an atom entry with the error details

    <entry>
      <id>tag:example.org,2006:errors:1234</id>
      <title>Disk full</title>
      <updated>2006-01-24T12:12:12Z</updated>
      <summary>Contact your sys admin at ...</span>
      <author>
        <name>System Admin</name>
        <email>admin@xxxxxxxxxxx</email>
      </author>
    </entry>

Our current implementation is using option (a).

Thoughts? Opinions? Other options?

- James