406 Not Acceptable

The HTTP 406 Not Acceptable client error response code indicates that a response matching the list of acceptable values defined in Accept-Charset and Accept-Language cannot be served.

In reality, this error is very rarely used: instead of responding using this error code that will be cryptic for the end user (and difficult to fix), servers ignore the relevant header and serve an actual page to the user. It is assumed that even if the user won't be completely happy, it will prefer this to an error code.

If a server returns such an error status, the body of the message should contain the list of the available representations of the resources, allowing to manually choose among them.

Status

406 Not Acceptable

Specifications

Specification	Title
RFC 7231, section 6.5.6: 406 Not Acceptable	Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content

Browser compatibility

See also

• Accept-Language
• Accept-Charset
• HTTP content negotiation