On Dec 9, 2009, at 11:52 AM, Jared Gisin wrote: > I’m writing a HTTP server that exposes various resources as an API. Unless > I’m missing something, twisted’s HTTP protocol implementation is in > twisted.web.http. > > The problem with this package is that it’s inexplicably wrapped up in HTML. > HTML has nothing to do with HTTP as a whole. Sure, HTML is often what HTTP > requests return, but there’s no reason why it should nor is there any RFC > that says it should. HTTP request can return anything. > > The software I’m writing is a programmatic interface. One never uses a web > browser, so things such as displaying tracebacks > (twisted.web.util.formatFailure) in HTML format is completely wrong. When > implementing HTTP, why assume the client always wants HTML. It seem > completely wrong from these modules and libraries to be so full of HTML > output. HTML output should be provided as a separate config or option for > twisted.web. In this case, why not just dump the traceback directly to the > HTTP entity-body? As a consumer of twisted.web, I should not have to battle > with the hard-coded HTML output of this library. If I want the library to > dump things in HTML output, I should have an option to tell it to do that > (and I should be able to better customize the HTML), but I should not get > HTML by default.
Customizability is great, and certainly error pages should really not be hard-coded at all. However, the default of returning HTML descriptions of errors is a good default, and should remain thus. There's usually two cases of interest: 1) A program is responding to the error. In that case, it will use the HTTP result code, and not care what the content is at all. 2) A human is reading the error message. At least 99% of the time, this will be happening through a web browser. They understand HTML. I'd expect your program to be in case #1, although I don't know if you have some need to parse out the particular tracebacks for some reason? James _______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
