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Series of posts on HTTP status codes (2018)(evertpot.com)
84 points by antonalekseev 7 days ago | 12 comments
  • o11c5 days ago

    One of the most irritating bugs in client libraries is if they hard-code 1xx behavior to particular numbers, rather than treating the entire range uniformly.

    This makes it easy to desync, though since it's not the server end it's rarely as catastrophic.

    To fix this, servers need to start returning bogus 199 Fix Your Client headers before a random fraction of all real responses.

  • AriedK5 days ago

    I read the url as: ever t-pot, as a reference to 418. Turns out it's the author's actual name.

  • VoidWhisperer5 days ago

    Title should probably be updated to include the fact that this is from 2018 (relevant as this series has been completed as opposed to having just been started)

    • roywashere5 days ago |parent

      Also, it is slightly outdated as it does not incorporate RFC9110 which renames some status codes which previously were WebDAV-only:

      https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/117611

    • smartmic5 days ago |parent

      Correct (and already done by now). Just a few days ago, there was the remarkable example that Cloudflare wants to use the code 402 (payment required) to keep AI crawlers away or ask them to pay. I still think it's a great idea, hopefully something will come of it.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44432385

  • Untit1ed5 days ago

    Dang these are much more useful than my first port of call for looking up http codes... which is http.cat/<code>. It's a shame you have to know what a code is to get to it... e.g. /404-not-found works instead of /404

    • dylan6045 days ago |parent

      the MDN article on response codes is my default

      https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

      You don't need to know the name. You can increment the URL directly as well

      • jdwithit5 days ago |parent

        Was going to post this, the Mozilla content is great.

    • bravesoul25 days ago |parent

      https://evertpot.com/http/404

      Seems to work :)

      Sorry bad joke.

    • angra_mainyu5 days ago |parent

      Always check MDN - for web stuff they truly are the best reference out there.

  • bravesoul25 days ago

    It's a great idea to blog through a "mundane" thing like this. You learn alot and have an impetus and won't run out of ideas to blog. There is always another status code! You could do the same with other things. E.g. programming languages or whatever.

  • chuckadams5 days ago

    I thought I was conversant in HTTP status codes, even the WebDAV ones, but "226 IM Used" was a new one for me. I wonder why content negotiation wasn't sufficient for this?