BrowsableAPIRenderer, Testing and 204 No Content

[josepdecid]

I have encountered a problem testing an endpoint that should return a 204 status.

After some debugging, I found that the problem comes from the DRF renderer classes. With the renderer BrowsableAPIRenderer, it renders the API page where you can see that the response status is HTTP 204 as it should be. However, testing that endpoint it returns a 200. I've tried with Postman and it produces the same response, a 200 instead of 204 (Check the screenshot below).

The solution was quite simple, I had the BrowsableAPIRenderer before the JSONRenderer so it was just a matter of changing the order:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    "DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES": [
        "rest_framework.renderers.JSONRenderer",
        "rest_framework.renderers.BrowsableAPIRenderer",
    ]
}

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However, this brings me to the two questions/doubts/thoughts I have:

1 - I think it is an error that the BrowsableAPIRenderer returns 200 when the status is 204. Sure, the response is not empty because it returns the HTML and a 204 is not semantically correct, but in my opinion it should be consistent, more so when in the rest of the status it works as expected. I've tried to replicate the same with all other 20X status codes but it seems that 204 is the only one that is causing issues. I have also tried with the 40X and no problems either (haven't tried all status codes but I expect that all the others work properly).

2 - I find it odd that someone would want to test the result of the BrowsableAPIRenderer and not the JSON itself. I think the tests could default to using the JSONRenderer and always have the option to change it if required (this one is perhaps a bit more controversial).

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Any thoughts on my 2 takes? Especially the first one.
I'm open to opening an issue if we end up considering that if it is a problem, and I could look into fixing it myself if need be.