Aaron Parecki

I'm really on the fence about using HTTP 5xx responses to indicate any sort of application-level information. Currently any time a client gets an HTTP 5xx error, it can assume something went wrong with the *transport* of the request, such as a gateway timeout.

In REST APIs, HTTP 501 indicates that the HTTP method itself is unsupported, which in this case is a POST request. Micropub is not a REST API though, so I would be worried that a 501 could inadvertently indicate to a client that a POST request is not supported.

Can you find examples of other non-REST APIs that use HTTP 501 for this feature? I wouldn't want to recommend 501 unless there are existing examples of other non-REST or RPC APIs using it.