[8010] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (www-talk@www10.w3.org)
Sat Apr 22 01:24:03 1995
From: www-talk@www10.w3.org
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 95 01:23:59 EDT
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Mike Meyer wrote:
>> Can someone explain where one should use a 403 response versus a 400
>> response? Is using 400 only for mailformed requests, and 400 for
>> requests with a command that isn't understood a reasonable
>> interpretation?
and Paul Phillips responded:
> My spec indicates that 403 implies greater server understanding than 400
> does. A 403 means the server tried to service the request, and failed,
> while a 400 means that the server knew based on the request that it would
> fail.
Ummmm, almost. 400 Bad Request indicates that the server was unable
to understand the request due to it being malformed. 403 Forbidden
indicates that the server *did* understand the request, but refuses to
service it for some reason that remains unknown to the client.
> There does seem to be some abiguity here, but both codes instruct the
> client not to repeat the request, so I don't think it's critical.
There is a certain amount of overlap between 400 and all 4xx responses,
but I don't consider that to be ambiguous. I'll change the spec so
that the purpose of the two codes is clarified.
Hmmmm, I could just change the example Reason Phrases to
400 You screwed up
403 Piss off
;-)
....Roy T. Fielding Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>
