[lamontcg]

> Your consumer disagrees, they'd like to know if their URL was fat fingered or if a record was missing.

Why?

How often does this really come up?

Who is typing in URLs like this manually?

If you're typo'ing it in code, are you not doing any kind of validation/testing against any kind of spec that can catch this?

Why is it up to the actual webservice returning a 404 to catch these kind of typo errors?

And I'm not saying I disagree with the argument -- I fully get the argument that was made, but practically the fact that you're caring about it suggests you're missing other components in your stack. You're producing a URL request which is outside of the spec of legal URLs for the webservice. You can validate that before you ever make a real web request against a real server.