On Nov 5, 2004, at 12:18 AM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
(lots of stuff ... )
Sending feedback to the HTTP server is a bad idea.
(lots more stuff ... )
While I grant the force of Roy's arguments, I have two points of disagreement. First, my experience of feed errors does not accord with his hypotheses; they are often in places that can be deterministically detected by a client and helpful feedback provided.
Second, and this is crucial, the error reporting is completely at the discretion of the server. The server can, if and only if it chooses, provide a ServiceError URI. If so, it's presumably ready to get reports and will do something more useful than dump them into logs/error_log.
If it's getting too many complaints to handle, or the complaints are malformed and not a source of useful information, all it needs to do is stop providing the URI and it'll stop getting them. (Although in either of these cases, they are probably usefully diagnostic of problems in the system that would benefit from someone's attention). By Roy's analogy with WebDAV, if there is widespread deployment of clients that (a) are incorrect in their intepretation of the spec and (b) are prone to griping voluminously at ServiceError URIs, then servers will stop providing ServiceError URIs. If not, some will provide them and this will be helpful in shaking errors out of the system.
To summarize, this *could* be misused, and it *could* be a source of high-volume irritation, but if it's clear that it can always be turned off by the server, then I think the benefit exceeds the (possible) cost. -Tim
