I'd like some clarification of the way container implementations are intended to interpret the msg argument of the, HttpServletResponse.sendError(int sc, String msg) method. According to the 2.2 spec, An optional String argument can be provided to the sendError method which can be used in the content body of the error. According to the 2.2 javadoc, Sends an error response to the client using the specified status code and descriptive message. The server generally creates the response to look like a normal server error page. According to the 2.1 javadoc, The message is sent as the body of an HTML page, which is returned to the user to describe the problem. The page is sent with a default HTML header; the message is enclosed in simple body tags (<body></body>). In addition, I have had experience of implementations which simply send the msg argument as the complete response entity without any additional boilerplate. The specs wording needs to be tightened up here. If the intent is that the msg argument be usable as an insertion into a piece of boilerplate, then there needs to be language specifying what the DOCTYPE of the enclosing message is (ie. is it HTML 3.2, 4.0, XHTML 1.0, XML 1.0?) and what the enclosing element is (<BODY>, <P>, <DIV>?) otherwise it will be difficult for a container to make any guarantees that the resulting entity is valid (or even well-formed). This could be a source of interoperability problems (ie. in one container a servlet produces valid error responses, in another, the same servlet produces invalid error responses). Given that in the not too distant future servlet implementors might want to generate XHTML/XML error responses, it might be better to simply deprecate this method and have them generate error responses explicitly in the same way as normal responses. Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin Cromwell Media Internet Systems Architect 5/6 Glenthorne Mews +44 (0)181 410 2230 London, W6 0LJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] England ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff SERVLET-INTEREST". Archives: http://archives.java.sun.com/archives/servlet-interest.html Resources: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/external-resources.html LISTSERV Help: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/user/user.html
