Graham wrote:
It's far too late for this, but how should Atom servers produce/
clients deal with error pages? Feedster regularly changes its search
results feed to a single entry "Search results temporarily offline"
feed document (RSS guid "http://www.feedster.com/";), and I think
served with HTTP status 200. This seems the wrong behavior for so
many reasons. What should they be doing in Atom?
Graham
I think there are two cases here:
* when publishing Atom feeds or entries through HTTP, an HTTP error
code with an Atom body is fine (at least for me). As far as
aggregator behavior is concerned, I think they could show the
entry as part of the feed but discard it as soon as the feed can
be retrieved without error.
* when using the Atom Publishing Protocol's POST or PUT, it might be
worth defining an error document type to tell the client why its
document has been refused (e.g. POSTing an Atom Entry with a
base64-encoded MSWord content and the server only accepts the
three "basic" content types; or an Atom Entry with more than one
category to a server supporting only one category per entry; or
using an extension "control information" not supported by the
server: it should be able to tell the client which one has been
refused; etc.)
--
Thomas Broyer
