On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 4:09 PM, André Warnier <a...@ice-sa.com> wrote: > But I have been trying to figure out a real use case, where expecting 404 > responses in the course of legitimate applications or website access would > be a normal thing to do, and I admit that I haven't been able to think of > any. > Can you come up with an example where this would really be a user case and > where delying 404 responses would really "break something" ?
Imagine you're a real estate agent. You have listings for properties, each one gets a unique URL. You want search engines to index your properties that are for sale. When they sell you want those properties to stop being shown in search engines. So you start returning a 404 for those pages. For a while you might still show something about the property with something saying that it's been sold and some links to other similar properties that aren't sold. Eventually you purge that property entirely and it's a generic 404 page. Clearly in such a scenario you don't want to delay 404 pages. There are of course other examples in other industries. But basically any situation where you were you have pages for things that are temporary you're probably going to want to do something like this.
