Support ChrisP <surgemailHIDDEN@t@netwinsite.com> wrote:

Doing it your way printing a message for "file not found" is friendly for humans when its a human
accessing the page. However, it's not friendly for bots and crawlers. Also, the application I wrote
presents a resized image file based on input query line parameters. Now when the browser does
its lookup on this with <img src="/scripts/image.exe?file=logo.gif&xy=100x50"> and sees a
content-type text/plain, 200 response, that isn't good. Also I can't do fantasy stuff like returning
a 304 on "If-Modified-Since" header cache checks.

I know that no browser supports a "status" header. It's actually formatted in the first header
presented to the browser, e.g. "HTTP/1.0 <status code> .." which we can't change. But scripting
languages like Perl allow you to use a "special" header to tell the server to change its return status
(and remove that special header before sending out). So I'm hoping you could do something like that
for us. Or maybe let us send out the entire header and I'd format my own HTTP/1.0 code line.

And ideally on any script crash, send at least a status 500 to stop that download presentation, or
add a content-type, which should do it as well.