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Comment by alganet | Hacker News Reader

This is nice. It reminds of how miserable my life is.

— Which HTTP code I should return for my API? I already used 404, 403, but I need another one. Damn, HTTP is so old and it makes no sense.

— You can't use HTTP codes like that Bob, they're not a free choice. They're for the protocol, not for your app.

— Let's look at the list. Hm... "412 Precondition Failed". Hey, it sounds nice. It fits to my use case. I'm gonna document it. It means the account is out of balance.

— What is this garbage? Please read the spec. This is going to make our API gateways, CDNs, everything go crazy. Can't let you move on with this PR.

— Look. I documented it, made an enum with the code, it's clean. I'm an experienced REST developer.

— It... it doesn't work like that Bob. Please, read the spec.

— Hey, got enough approvals, "412 Account Out Of Balance" it is! It passes the tests.

For each dev that knows proper HTTP, there's 10.000 Bobs.

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For the shortcoming of conveying errors strictly through HTTP status codes, consider:

RFC-7807, Problem Details for HTTP APIs[0]

From the introduction:

  HTTP [RFC7230] status codes are sometimes not sufficient to convey
  enough information about an error to be helpful.  While humans behind
  Web browsers can be informed about the nature of the problem with an
  HTML [W3C.REC-html5-20141028] response body, non-human consumers of
  so-called "HTTP APIs" are usually not.

  This specification defines simple JSON [RFC7159] and XML
  [W3C.REC-xml-20081126] document formats to suit this purpose.  They
  are designed to be reused by HTTP APIs, which can identify distinct
  "problem types" specific to their needs.

HTH

0 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7807

Good spec.

Nice one, but seems to be replaced with https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9457

My coworkers insisted on always returning 200 and having the status code in JSON.

At least at that point it’s clearly not HTTP anymore, and it’s better than pretending to be compliant like your Bob. But something dies inside me whenever I have to work with it.

That's exactly what SOAP and GraphQL do, they always return 200

Isn’t SOAP theoretically “transport agnostic”. It doesn’t leverage http verbs either.

Correct. theoretically SOAP could work using SMTP/POP or whatever transport mechanism.

I'd say returning 200 for all successes is reasonable if the responses are simple.

Returning 200 for an error makes no sense. Having 400s and 500s is the simplest way to have observability over protocol behavior (think logs, error rates, etc). If you use all 200s, you'd have to re-implement observability by yourself, so you lose simplicity that you gained by ignoring those statuses.

It's the same thing with caching stuff. You could implement those outside the protocol, but then you'd be writing your own protocol (trying to be smarter than decades of engineering efforts).

I prefer to treat HTTP as a transport layer. A 200 means the transport succeeded but doesn’t indicate that the RPC succeeded.

This makes no sense at all. "you got a response" means the transport succeeded, "it timed out" means the transport failed.

That’s a strong assertion. There’s plenty of status codes that indicate something bad happened at the HTTP level but don’t convey information about the RPC.

- 404 might mean the URL was wrong

- 405 might mean swapping POST with PUT

Not the http level… at the level above, the user of your api.

Both of these are simple programming errors. You might as well have used the wrong host or protocol for that matter

I've taken a very operational view of HTTP errors, which is "What do I want things receiving this error to do?" Unfortunately, that's not a clean question since there's no list you can simple consult to get all behaviors that all HTTP error messages cause. The most important of these is, if this is being accessed by a browser, what will the error code make it do?

Fortunately, for a lot of my API-type work, I also get to not care. I don't want some smart cache to think it knows how to cache my responses or anything and don't care about the sort of infrastructure that thinks it understands HTTP doing anything with my request.

200 {"error": "..."} is not necessarily invalid from this point of view, either. 200, the request was successfully processed and the successful result of that request as far as HTTP is concerned is an error. There doesn't seem a great need to tell HTTP there's an error, HTTP doesn't really care. Telling the browser there's an error has some marginal utility, but if it's an API and there's no browser involved, that doesn't matter much either. The 200 isn't going to fool it into thinking it should put the error into the history or whatever.

I've also learned to avoid getting too fancy with the codes. You will invoke some weird behaviors from systems you didn't even know cared about your connection. 200 {"error": "..."} may seem "wrong", but it is also generally safe. It will do what you expect.

It might be nice to live in a world where there are HTTP error codes that are suitable for everything I need, instead of a big pile of useless codes for abortive standards that never came to be and things nobody uses, and an underspecified set of codes for the things I actually want and use, but there's no point pretending that the standard is something other than it is, and as it stands now, a lot of times the HTTP result code is almost useless.

400 you screwed up vs 500 I screwed up is always better than 200 OK not really.

You can get more specific, and for REST style APIs the correct specific HTTP status code is usually apparent for both successful and unsuccessful requests, but 2xx/4xx/5xx is simple and should be trivial to determine for anything you are using HTTP for even if it's not REST-like.

I do tend to use those in exactly that way, yes.

However, while your mileage may vary, I end up getting the same complaint from the users either way. Even when my 400 contains an exact reason why the input is incorrect.

Granted, on the one hand, this can be fixed on the individual level, but on the other hand, it's the same effect writ small that when writ large makes the response codes nearly useless, so this post is maybe half cathartic grousing. I can't push caring about response codes. I can document it, I can yield detailed errors, and I can be as careful as I like, but this is a "it takes two to tango" situation and at scale, on average, the other end doesn't want to tango.

You're right about being safe rather than unecessarily fancy.

A lot of codes get real usage though. CDNs use ETags extensively to save bandwidth. It can save a lot of server time.

  - https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/reference/etag-headers/
  - https://techdocs.akamai.com/property-mgr/docs/val-entity-tag

Varnish, HAProxy, Apache mod-proxy, nginx all can do similar things. Some of them can do this even if you always return 200 (by having rewrite rules and so on). It is often better to leave this kind of work to some upper abstract layer. Some of thse codes are only applicable in a layered system (502, for example, often seen when nginx can't reach a backend application), so they seem useless to developers, but they're not.

For APIs, other stuff uses those codes. Tools like DataDog and NewRelic will get better if you use generic 400 and generic 500 for client and server errors respectively. You can make them work with 200s and a little configuration though, but it's extra work.

If you never needed any of this, it's better not to use it.

I should indeed have clarified that the browser web has a much richer set of headers and response codes in use, and they are truly useful, and anyone serving web pages at scale should indeed learn about them. IIRC it's still about 1/3rd to 1/4th of the nominally defined HTTP response codes that are useful, but it's still something.

The non-browser web, they approach useless. Which I'm not happy about and not celebrating or advocating for. It's just how it is.

I think that's one of the key differences between REST and other kinds of RPC architectures.

I've used SOAP and JSON-RPC, both of which (at least in many implementations) send RPCs as HTTP POST requests and receive 200 responses with any error messages in the body. They're just tunneling over HTTP. It's not necessarily wrong, although I'm convinced that leveraging the HTTP verbs and error codes with REST is a fundamentally better design for the use cases I've seen.

Ah, the eternal battle. Do you return an HTTP error code if the problem lies in the domain?

I think I've seen everything on that scale.

On one end: { status: 200, error: InsufficientFunds }

On the other: - "let's use 409, it perfectly fits our use case" + "but we don't have useful error codes for all the other domain errors."

Status 200 with "InsufficientFunds" can be correct.

Let's assume your resource is "/account/1234/withdraw-availability"

It's a hypothetical endpoint you can GET to know if you can withdraw money. You hit it, and the request is sucessful (the server understood and will inform you whether withdrawaw is available or not).

Let's assume your resource is "/account/1234/withdraw"

This other hypothetical endpoint you can POST a request for money withdraw. Returning 200 here means the server understood and processed your request, so a 200 that does not withdraw makes no sense.

The same endpoint could also return a success "201" accepted (the server understood the request, but it is not processed yet). In the body, there would be a link for "/withdrawaws/48957987593845983475/status", a resource specific to this future processing, which you can GET later (maybe 1ms later, within the same socket). This GET could also return a 200, saying that such withdrawaw was not possible (the server sucessfully understood the request and will inform you about the status of the withdrawaw).

For this modeling stuff, the Roy Fielding dissertation about REST is more enlightening than the spec. The spec is still needed though.

One more example, if your request contains a batch of operations, you generally have to return 200, or maybe 204, if it was successfully received and should not be retried in full. In the response body, you might give other response codes for specific errors or failures to retry in a new request. So it can easily make sense to return 200 when there are e.g. partial failures and partial success and the request was properly formatted, authorized and acted upon.

The problem ist that there are multiple status codes which should be used (400, 422, 500 etc). But others are massive footguns. Would have been better to have a "technical" status code and a "application status code", but hey that would have required better engineering.

RTFM. It's all there. Not a blogpost, not a cheat sheet, the manual (in this case, the spec). Yes, it takes a while.

Anything can be a footgun if misused.

To be fair, to me HTTP looks like:

- The first line of an HTTP request has its own format (space-separated-ish), and mixes method and URL path.

- The URL path in that first line has its own format and weird escaping, and mixes one path with zero-or-more key value pairs.

- The headers have their own format.

- The body has its own format.

Most (all?) HTTP libraries for clients and servers abstract all that mess away into a neat object that could be easily represented in JSON (or bencode if you want something simple-ish while supporting binary data), but it's like using a nice program while knowing it's written in C[1].

Of course, JSON has its own problems, but in that case at least we only need to deal with the problems of one format that supports with proper nesting, not 4 different weird formats masquerading as one.

[1]: Disclaimer, I don't like Rust, so don't take this as a RIIR thing.

EDIT: To be clear, I don't agree with how Bob misuses HTTP in your example. I just find it sad that we're locked into this weirdly complex protocol.

URLs are opaque:

  - https://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-ws/pp/connolly/slide8-0.html
  - https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html#opaque

For the protocol, any structure or meaning in URLs is irrelevant. It is one more example of mixing application domain with protocol level stuff.

HTTP header format goes back to ARPA times. Email reused them, so did HTTP.

- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc822#section-3.2

Many of these choices are there for backwards compatibility and reuse. I can totally understand why.

An HTTP body has no predefined format. It can be anything. It can be a stream (HTTP into WebSocket upgrade, for example). It is the media type that defines how the body should be interpreted.

HTTP requests are meant to be used before they are fully transmitted, and are formtted in a way to leverage socket communication. JSON, on the other hand, needs the whole document to be read before it can be safely interpreted.

HTTP has more moving parts, but it also does so much more. These two aren't even comparable, they're not in the same layer.

I understand the urge to "improve" on all of this "legacy", however, one must consider how much was built upon these standards and if there's anything real to gain by changing them.

I would love if we could improve on HTTP - even just clearly separating protocol from application would be so great. Maybe dropping some cruft, like the accept headers and so on. But yes, doing that is total folly.

The separation is your choice. It is not enforced, as this would require limitations that are not worth having.

You can totally drop accept headers if you write your own client and server implementation. HTTP works fine without them. The web as a living organism, not so much.

But hey, we don't need content type negotiation, right? XML will reign forever, mp3 is the ultimate audio format. It's not like new codecs and document types appear all the time and some kind of underlying architecture has to reserve space for that kind of change.

Don't people use ?format=json or /foobar.json anyway?

As I said, if you're writing your own client and server, you don't need Accept. You probably use just one homogenized content type.

Using `?format=json` is not offensive. It won't mess up some cache layer like improper status code semantics, so I don't really care that much about these if I see it. I wouldn't block a PR on that.

The overall web on the other hand, is supposed to be made of many different client and server implementations. Your browser still relies on Accept headers for displaying images, detecting language, uncompress gzipped responses, resuming paused downloads, showing that JSON API in a nice UI when you open in a dedicated tab, so many things.

To me, it makes sense to leverage the same content negotiation ideas for home grown stuff, even if only one content type is being used.

It starts being a problem if you're working on microservices, and one of them uses `.json` while other uses `?format=json`, made by different teams. The standard is the obvious solution. Instead, they'll either create inefficient clients full of complexities or fight until one of the workarounds prevail. So much easier to follow the standard.

Ah yeah no disagreements there. Better something that already works and is widely used with good ecosystem around it, than risk an xkcd 927 situation.

I understand that the people at the time (presumably) did it the best they could with the information and knowledge they had at the moment, while keeping backwards compatibility.

I only know a bit about HTTP/0.9 and can see how we moved from that to what we have today. I just find the current situation sad.

Like when something only supports ASCII, or only supports IPv4, or assumes I only have 1 CPU thread. Or like when some binary file is encoded in base64 before being sent over the network, only to be decoded on the receiving end. Stuff like that.

But I only feel that way thanks to having the huge benefit of hindsight and modern technology.

If ASCII is obsolete compared to Unicode, IPv4 is obsolete compared to IPv6, and single threadness is obsolete compared to multi-threading (I don't think that is a valid comparison, but let's go with it), then which standard makes HTTP obsolete?

HTTP/3 was published in 2022.

HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 don't look like that, anymore. The HEADERS frame is just a key-value map where the reserved keys :method, :scheme, :path etc are used for the previously top-level message elements.

I'm using 400 for everything, to the hell with it.

Yeah, same. Otherwise, domain and protocol error codes become a confusing mess.

I’d just send Bob a link to https://http.cat/412 and hope they get too distracted to continue the conversation.

Which article would you ask Bob to read to learn the right way to do it?

Bob has since moved on to crypto, leaving the cache invalidation eternally crippled. New Bob decided that everything is useless and wants to rewrite the whole backend using a faster language.

Have to admit I've never used this code, and didn't know what it was about. Quickly read up about it. So ETag is a hash of the resource. You must provide it with requests that modify the resource. If your hash doesn't match the server hash, then 412 Precondition Failed is returned?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/412

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#status.412

You can provide all sorts of conditions using HTTP headers such as "If-Match", "If-None-Match", "If-Modified-Since", "If-Range", etc. The server can chose an HTTP code to indicate some sort of cache invalidation signal.

304 means "you're good, your cached version satisfies the conditions"

412 means "you're not good, your cached version does not satisfy the conditions"

412 usually applies to modifications, but it could be for reading too, in the case of ranged requests (getting a specific range of bytes from a large representation). See the "Range" header.

These are all interconected. The headers, the codes, etc. They are very useful for caching and can save a lot of bandwidth. Browsers and CDNs use them extensively. Server-to-server communcation could use them as well, but I haven't seen popular implementations (let's say, a web framework that provides abstraction over these mechanisms).

Also, other popular HTTP codes have cache implications.

For example, 404 implies "No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent". Cache invalidation headers don't apply to this code because a 404 means there's something about the _resource_ and not only the _representation_ that could not be found. That client cannot cache the 404 result, not even for a fraction of a second.

404's brother 410 implies "This condition is expected to be considered permanent.". A client that gets a 410 can cache that result, never needing to reach the server again. It means it's gone forever. That client can decide to never look up that URI again.

Very often, "400 Bad Request" is the best HTTP you can use if you are not sure what to use. Then, describe what the error means using other HTTP components and/or the response body.

HTTP can be very simple. GET (ask for a representation) and POST (send a representation) as methods only. 200 (success), 400 (client error) and 500 (server error) as response codes only. It's the best way to start, then move to more elaborate protocol features as you learn.

HTTP decision diagram: https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram and Know Your HTTP Well: https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well

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