On Jonnay's blog today (at jonnay.net), there's this new post talking about an issue with the way PHP handles certain errors.

With all my REST and AJAX explorations, I have run into what I consider to be a fundamental issue in PHP's error handling: when the parser or interpreter runs into an error it will always return HTTP status code 200.

Semantically this is wrong. Here is the way it should be, at least in my eyes:

If PHP runs into a non-recoverable error (E_ERROR, E_PARSE, E_CORE_ERROR, E_CORE_WARNING, E_COMPILE_ERROR and E_COMPILE_WARNING; i.e. where the error cannot be trapped by set_error_handler()), it should spit out a HTTP status code of 500 (Internal Server Error), and depending on the setting of the ini directive display_errors display the error text, or conversely the standard Internal Server Error page.

He meditation (a set of classes that aid in REST APIs).