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Almost any web server can be configured to provide a generic response to a specific request, for example by ignoring some or all of the url path, and in practic

Almost any web server can be configured to provide a generic response to a specific request, for example by ignoring some or all of the url path, and in practice I would bet that a majority of actual instances do this for at least some sets of requests. (To confirm my theory in 20 seconds I checked if https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nonexistent_user_1620 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nonexistent_user_1620 returns a 404 or a 200 - it's the latter.) It's silly to pretend that the use of a 404 in this type of circumstance is either clearcut in the standards or ubiquitous in practice.

shkkmo 3y ago
> It's silly to pretend that the use of a 404 in this type of circumstance is either clearcut in the standards or ubiquitous in practice. The standards seem pretty clear to me. I would point out that technically, the path portion of the HN URI does indeed point to a valid endpoint, it is the query portion of the URI (usually not used by the server to do any routing) that points to a non-existent resource. Still, HN is wrong here and should be returning a 404 status.