On Dec 9, 2009, at 19:34, James Y Knight wrote: > 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?
Hi All, I want to second Jared's point. In my case, the responses from web servers, including the body, often end up in log files. HTML looks pretty ugly there. Though this is a minor point for me in the otherwise great Twisted software! Regards, Valeriy _______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
