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

[Austin Matzko]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 5:31 PM, Mike Schinkel
<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> Presenting a 404 means "Resource Not Found" when the valid resource to serve is "There are no posts here."  That should get a 200.
>
>> Remember WordPress only 'does' posts, pages, and links, they are
>> it's only content.
>
> That's an extremely narrow viewpoint that will be proven wrong with almost 100% certainty as WordPress evolves.

Mike, I follow your overall argument, but what makes me question it is
that it seems to imply that there could be *nothing* that would
warrant a 404 response.  Since almost every possible request could be
a potential location for pages, posts, and other objects, shouldn't
they all be "X is not here" (200)?

> Again at this point I am not trying to impose this on others but there should be an easy way for a themer or plugin dev to make it so.

You can change the 404s using existing filters and action hooks,
unless I'm mistaken.