RFC4918 is where lots of the status codes people often throw into "REST" APIs came from... http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc4918/?include_text=1 http://datat

RFC4918 is where lots of the status codes people often throw into "REST" APIs came from... http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc4918/?include_text=1 http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc4918/?include_text=1 I'm not a big fan of this practice b/c I've found that as APIs evolve the status codes end up having application specific meaning rather than standard, protocol specific meaning. Bottom line, I think that unless your API very closely resembles the kind of thing WebDav is designed to do, it's better to just do a simple REST version with core HTTP status codes and handle any standardized response semantics inside the response body.