New HTTP Codes

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-new-status-02

by alcuadrado • 15 years ago

360 80 15 years ago

tools.ietf.org

rwolf• 15 years ago

Today I learned about If-Match. 428 Precondition Required looks great!

These all seem immediately practical status codes that add semantics I've been wanting. Great! In particular I am happy about the 429 Too Many Requests header, as every time I've done rate throttling I've had to quibble over what code to actually send back.

simondlr• 15 years ago

Yeah. This is great. Will work great with APIs.

i386• 15 years ago

What code did you use? I've typically used a 408 in a throttling use case but it never seemed to fit well (our client handled this response from our server with an exponential back off so we were not relying on another client to handle it correctly).

caf• 15 years ago

503 seems the most appropriate of the current codes ("The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay.")

antimora• 15 years ago

I wish HTTP requests submitted time zone information.

mooism22• 15 years ago

Just the current offset from UTC, or including the whole daylight savings malarkey?

AndrewDucker• 15 years ago

The actual Timezone would be great (something like Europe/London, etc.) Using the same format as the tz database: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database#Names_of_time_zones

klodolph• 15 years ago

You can get the offset with JavaScript, at least.

zb• 15 years ago

It has been proposed several times. 2008: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sharhalakis-httptz-05

1995 - shot down because (paraphrasing) "I don't need this so neither should you": http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/ange/archives/archives-95/htt...

The general consensus seems to be that since this can never be all things to all people, we can't ever implement it. To me it seems like this is crying out for a Worse is Better solution.

mnot• 15 years ago

I think we'll see this discussion come around again soon; maybe it'll stick this time.

dochtman3• 15 years ago

Look at this recent Mozilla thread, asking the same question:

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_t...

It offers reasons why it's a bad idea, and an alternative (in HTML5 instead of HTTP).

ck2• 15 years ago

Summary:

  428 Precondition Required
  429 Too Many Requests
  431 Request Header Fields Too Large 
  511 Network Authentication Required

I've been using 414 Request-URI Too Long for 431 and 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable for 429

ra• 15 years ago

Apart from the obvious semantics, what's the difference between 428 and 412? (412 - precondition failed)

jsn• 15 years ago

AFAICS, 412 is only meaningful when the request did specify a precondition (which failed), while 428 means that the request didn't specify some precondition (which was required by server).

IsaacSchlueter• 15 years ago

"Apart from the semantics", the difference is 16.

Robin_Message2• 15 years ago

511 seems a little pointless -- browsers can treat it differently, but if the intermediate gateway intends to be malicious, then it won't return 511 anyway. The only useful thing I can see is avoiding accidents/attacks on the gateway compromising its clients.

bostonvaulter2• 15 years ago

I don't think 511 is so much for security, I see it as being more focused on usability. For example if you have thick client program that talks to a backend server (perhaps for updates) and it receives a 511 response it can then tell the user that they need to login to the proxy (or just pop up a web browser for them).

objclxt• 15 years ago

Exactly: a good example is how OS X currently works - everytime you connect to a new WiFi hotspot it fires a request to a static page on Apple's server in the background, to determine whether or not you have to sign in. If it detects unexpected content it assumes it's a sign-in page for a WiFi hotspot, and presents it modally.

Under this proposed system the OS can simply check for an appropriate HTTP response code, which makes life a little easier.

rmc• 15 years ago

511 is aimed for the wifi networks that you find in hotels & airports where you have to pay money for access, or create an account.

yxhuvud• 15 years ago

Indeed. It will be very nice to not return a 403.

modeless• 15 years ago

It has nothing to do with security, but it's not pointless. It tells the client that this response did not come from the server it attempted to contact. This is especially useful for non-browser clients that will otherwise simply choke on the 302 redirect normally used for this purpose, but it could also be useful for browsers to present a better UI for signing on to the internet.

My only concern is that 511 could be seen as legitimizing the practice of putting silly click-through terms-of-service roadblocks on free wi-fi (making it impossible for devices to connect without a human operating a web browser), but since people are doing it anyway we might as well support it properly.

Robin_Message2• 15 years ago

Ah, I get it. Thanks to you and bostonvaulter2.

It'd be interesting to see whether adding authentication/sign on to a protocol like DHCP would fit better. The hijacking of HTTP, while it obviously works well in the default case, seems nasty and this error code fixes the wrong problem. Better to have a DHCP field that tells you to visit a specific website to log in; then the OS could display that website when you connect to the wireless. A further advantage of putting it into the connectivity protocols is it makes automatic payment and negociation by the client's software possible—for example, connecting to the cheapest wifi in range.

deno2• 15 years ago

> My only concern is that 511 could be seen as legitimizing the practice of putting silly click-through terms-of-service roadblocks on free wi-fi (making it impossible for devices to connect without a human operating a web browser), but since people are doing it anyway we might as well support it properly.

Filter on User-Agent to only show terms to browser. If non-human agent spoofs browser signature, it’s their own fault.

technomancy• 15 years ago

I got bit by this using the Emacs package manager. It follows redirects, so it ended up trying to fetch a package and getting back a bunch of HTML with a 200 response code, which it tried to byte-compile with about as spectacular a failure as you would imagine.

stygianguest• 15 years ago

A bit offtopic, but does anybody know what typesetting system was used to produce this document? It looks like troff manpages. Is that what is used for RFC documents as well? I love the oldschool look of it.

rev087• 15 years ago

Nothing special, it`s just your browser's default monospaced font.

p4bl0• 15 years ago

It was created using rfcmarkup[1], a tool made by the ietf. A quick look at the source of the page in the "generator" meta tag would have told you that (that's how I just found out) :-).

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/tools/rfcmarkup/

km3k• 15 years ago

Yes, all RFC documents use this style. You can find more at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html

adulau• 15 years ago

You have different tools to write RFC-like documents. One of the most common one used is xml2rfc (http://xml.resource.org/) but there is also rst2rfc (http://code.google.com/p/rst2rfc/).

worldimperator• 15 years ago

Can't wait to set browser dependent status codes :-D

dochtman3• 15 years ago

What happened to 430?

riprova• 15 years ago

dunno but 418 is still my fave :-)

dochtman3• 15 years ago

Asked Mark Nottingham on Twitter, 430 is used in this other draft RFC:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-pipeline-01

(It's 430 Would Block.)

billpg2• 15 years ago

Shouldn't 429 (Too many requests) be a 5xx code?

moserware• 15 years ago

I think it's fine. 4xx is a way of saying the client did something wrong that it can potentially fix (i.e. slow down requests). 5xx is more opaque meaning there is nothing the client can do to fix the problem.

snorkel• 15 years ago

In general 4xx errors are problems with the request, and 5xx errors are operational issues with the server/network

njharman• 15 years ago

Too continue. It's "you're sending ttoo many requests" not "server is overloaded/getting too many requests". Hence it's a client error 4xx, and not server 5xx.

bromagosa• 15 years ago

OMG really? Do we want to make HTTP even bigger? Don't we want to dump it for good and look for something more suitable to what the modern web needs instead?

gujk• 15 years ago

What do you propose we do in he meantime, before all the existing servers and clients are migrated?

uriel• 15 years ago

I propose HTTP 0.2, a subset of HTTP 1.1 with some simple extensions: http://http02.cat-v.org

Hoff• 15 years ago

Rewriting a large and complex enterprise-class application is tough enough, and a task that can variously (and expensively) fail.

Rewriting the whole of the World Wide Web?

Your replacement had better have a solid compatibility and migration path with "legacy" HTTP, and provide a substantial improvement over what HTTP and the existing tools provides, and clients and a migration path for a majority of the platforms and tools and browsers and embedded browsers and embedded web servers in use, and the budget and the time to make the replacement push.

sanxiyn• 15 years ago

Google is trying: http://www.chromium.org/spdy

icebraining• 15 years ago

Why exactly do you say HTTP is unsuitable for the modern web? If anything, the problem is that we don't abide by it enough.

More codes - which, by the way, do not increase the size of the packets - are better for the "modern web", the one where REST APIs are being adopted and which has more and more automated clients which require computer readable information.

afdssfda• 15 years ago

511: 'Unknown clients then have all traffic blocked, except for that on TCP port 80, which is sent to a HTTP server (the "login server") dedicated to "logging in" unknown clients, and of course traffic to the login server itself.'

Ugh. Couldn't this be more generic?

gwillen• 15 years ago

That section is descriptive of current practice. The semantics of 511 are the previous section.

otherports• 15 years ago

Agreed. Is the login server not allowed to run on port 443? Is it not permissible to redirect HTTP traffic on other ports such as 8080 and 9006?

aninteger• 15 years ago

Isn't this something that the http server handles? I am not in web development except for basic php and cgi scripts. Are people actually writing web app code to dictate what http code comes back on each request?

politician• 15 years ago

Yes, sometimes the correct response is not an HTML page, but an error code (e.g. 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Found are used to implement redirects).

ataggart• 15 years ago

And sometimes the correct response is an error code and an HTML page, e.g., 401 Unauthorized and an ajax login page that reloads the current URL.

vdm• 15 years ago

A correct response code is the minimum to play nice, and a body, HTML or otherwise, is courteous. They are not mutually exclusive.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/linux/cgi/ch03_03.htm#ch03-9-f...

mikeryan• 15 years ago

You see more explicit use of http status codes in web service (data) API's particularly ones using REST.

netghost• 15 years ago

429 Too Many Requests is really great for APIs, hopefully http clients start supporting this.

a5seo• 15 years ago

428 seems interesting as a way to serialize objects and store them client-side, but assure the version stays consistent with the server. Or am I overthinking it?

ericmoritz• 15 years ago

Whelp I guess this needs updating now, https://github.com/basho/webmachine/raw/master/docs/http-hea...

edoloughlin• 15 years ago

One quibble. Perhaps I don't quite get the philosophy behind these, but wouldn't it be more useful to have a uniform structure to the responses. E.g., how useful is it to the average user to get a human-readable response for 428 when it's likely to be consumed by an app (i.e., JS) which would have to parse the suggested <p> tag?

johns• 15 years ago

You can return any content type you want and you should use content negotiation to return the type the client is expecting. The HTML descriptions are only suggestions.

afhof• 15 years ago

429 looks to me as if it might be addressing aggressive http pipelining, but I was under the impression that most browsers have pipelining turned off.

_pdeschen• 15 years ago

Both Firefox and opera offer pipelining while it is deactivated on chrome (next release will have it on by default).

textgoeshere• 15 years ago

Can I start using any of these codes right now? It looks like this is still a draft. Thanks!

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