I'd never even noticed there was such a thing as a 410 until this. And it's not surprising - what incentive is there for a team in the real world with a shippin

I'd never even noticed there was such a thing as a 410 until this. And it's not surprising - what incentive is there for a team in the real world with a shipping product to honor it? There's a pretty obvious incentive to ignore it: it takes developer time to implement, and the result of the 'feature' is that your customer may get permanently locked out of a net resource. What happens if a website admin accidentally puts up a 410, or - worse yet - if a previous owner of the domain once put up a 410 for a page with the same URI. I suppose there's an RFC for the code somewhere, but it seems like a bad idea. I pity the tech support agent who has to explain why his/her customer's browser refuses to visit foo.com/bar when everyone else can view it and there's no longer any way of knowing that once, for an afternoon in 1997 the page threw a 410!