[Zope] [ANSWER] 500 error with IE on login

[Gregory Dudek]

Re. returning a 500 status on an authentication error, which makes
the login screen invisible to MSIE users on windows:

>On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 12:41:56PM -0400, SOMEBODY wrote:
 >>I strongly oppose modifying a properly functionng, RFC-conforming
 >>product to coddle a non-informative and non-RFC-conforming product.
 >>Fix the broken product, not the working one.

(Please note that the quote above was a followup to my message and 
it was not what I said! )
 If I was making a tool/product only for myself, my team or something like
that I would fully concur. This is not the case for most zope users.

 a) If zope is used to support a publically-acessible site it absolutely
must work in a manner that makes it convenient and acceptable
for MSIE/Windows users: I take it that's not debatable.
    Since I never user MSIE/Win myself I had a hell of a time figuring out
the 500-error bug (blaming it on networking issues and such).  This is not
a good state of affairs.
    While i don't like it, MSIE/Win is a de facto standard.  (I know this
is flame bait... you know what I mean, I feel sick for saying it, so please
let's not get into it.)
    The hard-nosed "don't fix a conforming product line" if taken too strongly
it the kind of attitude that could really be bad for zope acceptance.

 b) It seems that semantically a "server error" (500)
code isn't even the right code for this particular problem, so the fix
is fine there (although I have not checked the RFC).

 c) The worse issue is what to do with the other unexpected cases where
zope might generate a 500 error as it's a default exception code.  On my
zope, I want the user to see the message page, if any.  
Inserting code to detected the
browser/system and only change a 500 to a 200 code for MSIE/Win users
alone seems fine but I'm not gonna bother doing this myself right now,
in particular 'cause I don't know how robust it would be.

 d) As an aside, does any other browser ever really care about these codes?


Greg Dudek
http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~dudek