Using HTTP status codes for error messaging leaves quite a bit to be desired. You don't have that many options beyond a handful in the 4xx (400, 404, 409) and

Using HTTP status codes for error messaging leaves quite a bit to be desired. You don't have that many options beyond a handful in the 4xx (400, 404, 409) and 5xx (500, 503) range. For the most part, they are either really general or too specific to be correctly used. It'd be nice if there were a standard for supplemental error messages. Edit: (to the downvoter) this post explicitly mentioned "You get clean exception handling via HTTP status codes". The exception handling may be clean, but it's extremely coarse.