On 26/01/2008, jidanni@jidanni.org jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
Gentlemen, it is you who are ruining network standards.
HEAD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Non_Existent_Page --> 200 OK
It is clearly a case of 404 Not Found.
You can still give the same "You can create this article" message AND return a truthful HTTP code.
Else how is one to use a linkchecker to your links? Why are MediaWiki wikis special?
Yes, 200 OK for action=edit, and disambiguation pages, but not for the basic clear case of the spirit of 404 Not Found.
What if all ==External links== always returned 200? How could a bot detect linkrot? Do unto others...
This has come up before - if memory serves, the excuse given was that IE doesn't always show custom error pages (I think there is a minimum size, although I can't see how the Mediawiki pages would be shorter than that). It's something that bothers me as well - a page saying "page not found" really should return a 404 error code...