HTML+ Comments

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Mon, 19 Jul 1993 15:53:44 -0500

I would like to again bring up the error detection problem. Let's say
you are in the middle of transmitting a document and you get some kind of
error (disk error, processing error, whatever). There is currently not
any clean way to notify the client.

We can partially solve this by using the <EMBED> tag, something like this.

HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
Date: Monday, 19-Jul-93 20:20:09 GMT
Server: plexus/2.2.1
MIME-version: 1.0
Last-modified: Friday, 16-Jul-93 18:29:47 GMT
Content-type: text/html

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Sample Document</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Everything is going along just fine...</H1>
And then BOOM... we get a disk error or something.

<EMBED TYPE="www/mime">
HTTP/1.0 500 Internal Error
Date: Monday, 19-Jul-93 20:22:00 GMT
Server: plexus/2.2.1
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html

<HEAD><TITLE>Server Error: 500 Internal Error</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY><H1>Server Error: 500 Internal Error</H1>
document ``foo'' does not exist <P>
If you feel this is a server problem and wish to report it, please
include the error code, the requested URL, which and what version
browser you are using, and any other facts that might be relevant to: <P>
<ADDRESS>webmaster@BSDI.COM</ADDRESS>
</BODY>
</EMBED>

But that doesn't completely solve the problem, as we might be in the middle
of some other <EMBED> or something like that, and what happens when you
"double fault" (get an error inside an error)?

Ideas?

--sanders