2011/7/2 Randall Leeds <[email protected]>: > > No, I meant 400. If we were really being pushy about forcing > application/json we could reject a request that didn't include it if > we felt like it.
Not to beat this into the ground, but actually that would be a 406 Not Acceptable. (HTTP has a status code for every occasion!) However, the spec explicitly says that it’s OK to return JSON even if the client didn’t Accept: it: > Note: HTTP/1.1 servers are allowed to return responses which are > not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the > request. In some cases, this may even be preferable to sending a > 406 response. User agents are encouraged to inspect the headers of > an incoming response to determine if it is acceptable. <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html> Which seems eminently reasonable to me. —Jens
