Colleagues, During the ALTO WG session today, a question was raised against the ALTO protocol spec about what should the behaviour be when an error occurs but the client included an Accept: header in its request but application/alto-error+json was not included in the Accept header.
RFC2616 states: If an Accept-Encoding field is present in a request, and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable according to the Accept-Encoding header, then the server SHOULD send an error response with the 406 (Not Acceptable) status code. However, draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics (which is currently in WG LC and will obsolete RFC2616 when published) states: If an Accept header field is present in a request and none of the available representations for the response have a media type that is listed as acceptable, the origin server MAY either honor the Accept header field by sending a 406 (Not Acceptable) response or disregard the Accept header field by treating the response as if it is not subject to content negotiation. Which confirms what I said at the mic that in the case being considered the ALTO server is allowed to return a response with a Content-Type of application/alto-error+json if an ALTO error occurs and the client has included an Accept header in its request but not included application/alto-error+json in the Accept header. Ben _______________________________________________ alto mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto
