REST API 404: Bad URI, or Missing Resource?

Question

I\'m building a REST API, but I\'ve encountered a problem.

It seems that accepted practice in designing a REST API is that if the resource requested doesn\'t exist,

Answer 1

The Uniform Resource Identifier is a unique pointer to the resource. A poorly form URI doesn't point to the resource and therefore performing a GET on it will not return a resource. 404 means The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. If you put in the wrong URI or bad URI that is your problem and the reason you didn't get to a resource whether a HTML page or IMG.