Understood, and after thinking about it, I do agree with your definition. On the other hand (and this is purely academic), I do find that returning 404 if a query parameter is malformed is not helpful to the client: it's not incorrect, since the resource wasn't found, but answering 400 tells him the reason why the resource couldn't be found - because the server couldn't understand his query and he should try and fix it.
Both seem correct to me, and I find that 400 gives more information to clients. Bit of a moot point though, since there appears to not be any way for me to do that using JAX RS :) Nicolas ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=2380801
