I actually felt vaguely inspired tonight 
When we were all drinking tulip foreign bottled beer after the end of @media this year, my erstwhile colleague Drew McLellan and I were discussing my other erstwhile colleague Stuart Langridge's presentation about underused HTTP response status codes (one of my favourite subjects, but I should have realised that Langridge, Whom God Preserve, would use them as stepping stones to fame and fortune before I ever got around to it).
Drew postulated that somebody ought to write a PHP module that would make it easy to send the appropriate status code without having to worry too much about the details. I assume that he meant the kind of thing that checks the client and sends (when appropriate, of course) a "303 See Other" for clients that claim to be HTTP/1.1, but a "302 Found" for HTTP/1.0 clients that don't grasp the subtle distinction between the two.
However, this implies adding some mechanism for specifying the intent of the response, in such a manner as can be understood by the average bozo writing PHP with no understanding, but merely a vague hope that, if they tinker with it enough, it'll start to do what they wanted (if only on Tuesdays).
Catering for imbeciles can be hard... maybe I should make it work properly first (i.e. for non-bozos like Drew), then seek to educate the imbeciles through documentation describing assorted use cases for the different status codes.
Actually, that sounds like it might be a win - I think I'll do that
When we were all drinking tulip foreign bottled beer after the end of @media this year, my erstwhile colleague Drew McLellan and I were discussing my other erstwhile colleague Stuart Langridge's presentation about underused HTTP response status codes (one of my favourite subjects, but I should have realised that Langridge, Whom God Preserve, would use them as stepping stones to fame and fortune before I ever got around to it).
Drew postulated that somebody ought to write a PHP module that would make it easy to send the appropriate status code without having to worry too much about the details. I assume that he meant the kind of thing that checks the client and sends (when appropriate, of course) a "303 See Other" for clients that claim to be HTTP/1.1, but a "302 Found" for HTTP/1.0 clients that don't grasp the subtle distinction between the two.
However, this implies adding some mechanism for specifying the intent of the response, in such a manner as can be understood by the average bozo writing PHP with no understanding, but merely a vague hope that, if they tinker with it enough, it'll start to do what they wanted (if only on Tuesdays).
Catering for imbeciles can be hard... maybe I should make it work properly first (i.e. for non-bozos like Drew), then seek to educate the imbeciles through documentation describing assorted use cases for the different status codes.
Actually, that sounds like it might be a win - I think I'll do that
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