I'd probably go with the commenting route myself, and extract the comments with HTML::Parser. This doesn't have the drawbacks you mention for the httpd code thing (i.e. is easily extensible) and won't bother anybody viewing things in a GUI browser at all, and may help 'em if they know to look for them.

Another option which may be (ok, probably is) unavailable is to return pure XML and include explicit <error> tags in it (biggest problem: not every user's browser will support XML).

Of course, you could combine the two approaches, include some XML in comments for the customized LWP agents; parse that with a standard XML parser (which could generate your errors as a nice data structure with only a little sweat, which is one nice thing about the XMLy approach in the first place) , and you're golden...

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

In reply to Re: Providing Hints to LWP Applications by arturo
in thread Providing Hints to LWP Applications by princepawn

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