Re: Error Reporting Format

[Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@xxxxxx>]

James M Snell wrote:
> I don't care so much about NIH issues ;-) ... what I do care about is 
> being able to provide a localized description of the error.  The HTTP 
> status codes provide the general classification of the error (e.g. the 
> request was malformed, the request was forbidden, there was a server 
> error, user needs to be authenticated, etc), what we primarily need for 
> the error reporting format is just a way of serving up some text 
> localized for the current user that describes the specific error that 
> occurred (e.g. the request was forbidden because of an unacceptable 
> content[type], the internal server error was caused by a full disk, 

I see. The WebDAV approach is a bit different, it assumes that it's more 
useful to have more precision in sending the error condition, and that 
the recipient will be more likely to be able to generate a readable and 
localized error description from it.

> etc).  My concern with using the DAV:error is that a) it doesn't appear 
> to give me a way of including a localized textual description (right??) 

It could, but only using an extension, which would of course not be 
recognized by standard clients.

> and b) given that we're not supporting any other DAV functionality in 
> our implementation, it would likely be more confusing to our users to 
> return information using the DAV namespace than it would be to just 
> return some simple XML, XHTML or Atom format.
> ...

Best regards, Julian