Why is error 410 considered a user error (4xx) and not a redirect (3xx) or a server error (5xx)? I request a payload from a server, and the server returns a link. I copy the link and the link gives 410? It isn't my fault to verify the link actually exists on their server. But at the same time, from the server's point of view the error originated from me, as I accessed something that doesn't exist, similar to 404 where I access something that was never there.
Can anyone help me understand the decision behind this?
"410 Gone" client error response code indicates that access to the target resource is no longer available at the origin server and that this condition is likely to be permanent.
If you don't know whether this condition is temporary or permanent, a 404 status code should be used instead.
CodePudding user response：
Why is error 410 a user error and not a server error?
It's not a "user" error, it's a client error; but yeah, that's a lousy label. The labels reflect the client-server architectural constraint, but it might be better to use labels that point more directly at the contents of the request, rather than the client (or the user).
In practice, it's a client error for the same reason that 404 is a client error; it is specifically calling attention to the target resource of the HTTP request.
In the context of the web, it does make some (imperfect) sense - the client followed a broken link (which could be a consequence of the server's current representations, but might also come from following links in stale representations, following stale bookmarks, a spelling error in a representation provided by a different server, etc).
CodePudding user response：
It's not a question of fault, it just means that the request should not be considered to ever work in the future (it shouldn't be retried). Whereas a server error (like a 5xx error) could be retried periodically and should eventually work sometime in the future since the request itself is considered valid.