Is It OK To Respond With A 400 Bad Request When The Client Does Not Use AJAX?
I'm developing a web app that extensively uses modal dialogs.
The dialogs are loaded via AJAX, and the HTTP response contains just a portion of HTML, not a full HTML document. I don't want a search engine to index these publicly accessible URLs if it finds them.
I can't use a meta robots, as the HTML portion returned does not have a <head>.
I prefer to avoid adding every single URL to my robots.txt, or grouping all my URLs under a common prefix, such as /ajax/.
So I thought I could simply return a 400 Bad Request if the request is not performed with AJAX, i.e. does not contain the X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest header.
Is 400 Bad Request suitable for this purpose?
Answer
Verbatim copy of RFC 7231, section 6.5.1:
The 400 (Bad Request) status code indicates that the server cannot or will not process the request due to something that is perceived to be a client error
So yes, it is okay.
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