The httpbis drafts mentioned in another thread clarify the intent of Berners-Lee, Fielding et al. in support of Paul's view:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-01.txt(Expires July 15, 2008) HTTP status codes are extensible. HTTP applications are not required to understand the meaning of all registered status codes, though such understanding is obviously desirable. However, applications MUST understand the class of any status code, as indicated by the first digit, and treat any unrecognized response as being equivalent to the x00 status code of that class, with the exception that an unrecognized response MUST NOT be cached. For example, if an unrecognized status code of 431 is received by the client, it can safely assume that there was something wrong with its request and treat the response as if it had received a 400 status code. In such cases, user agents SHOULD present to the user the entity returned with the response, since that entity is likely to include human- readable information which will explain the unusual status. While this is not strictly canon yet, I think Restlet should track this clarified behavior. - Rob
