[wp-hackers] Should Monthly Archive Pages ever return 404?

[Mike Schinkel]

I've just noticed something that surprised me, that if I go to an archive page for which there are no posts for a given month that I get a 404 error which doesn't exactly provide a great user experience for people hacking URLs. Should it (at least optionally) return a 200 ok but visually there are no posts for that month? 

-Mike Schinkel 
http://mikeschinkel.com/