
So, I looked at Plesk's 404 Page - jaybol
http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/ee4zc/so_i_looked_at_plesks_404_page/
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pilif
Good thing plesk added that additional comment. Because their error message is
so much more informative than the default IE provides to help the user in case
of uninformative error messages.

Yes. That's really well done.

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Semiapies
1) It's a 404 page. The main information here is "your link doesn't work". No
detailed diagnostic is needed.

2) This default 404 page can be customized to match a site layout and styling
and possibly have search boxes, etc. to help you find the page you were
looking for. You even helpfully get a comment to let you know to keep your
page code over 512 bytes.

~~~
pilif
1) the IE default page gives additional information what could cause the
problem and how to maybe fix it. And it is localized to the users language. As
such IE's page is much better for a non-technical user and doesn't at all
impede the technical user.

2) the moment that page gets customized with all that info you propose it will
be longer than the 512 bytes at which point IE will not display its customized
error page.

Plesk's solution here does nothing but make life harder for non-techies (which
admittedly don't use plesk) for no reason what so ever. The page served in the
example is inferior to IE's page in all aspects. Hence my snarky comment

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Semiapies
1) Not all defaults are awesome. The issue here is that this is not even a
_site_ default, this is a default for a multi-website management program.

And for that matter, if you leave the wrong settings unset on recent versions
of IIS, this message won't go out anyway, since IIS will push its _own_
default page for non-200 responses.

2) It's trivial to have a simple, CSS-based site layout that requires less
than 512 bytes in the base HTML page. For a simple notice that this isn't a
known page on the site, but here's a search form, you could easily still be
under 512 bytes.

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RyanMcGreal
Instead of padding their 404 with a smarmy comment, they could have padded it
with, you know, actually useful navigating tools for visitors.

~~~
Semiapies
It's a default page provided by _web hosting management software_. You use
Plesk to manage multiple web sites, which may not be related to each other or
even use similar backends (for instance, if you're a web host with multiple
clients).

The people managing the code and content of the site in question are
responsible for customizing their error pages.

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RyanMcGreal
Good point. This makes more sense as a default 404 page.

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smh
Microsoft products are full of annoying features like this. Another example is
Outlook and the way it removes arbitrary newlines from plain text emails.

Also: <http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/>

Choice quote: Rule of thumb--every time Microsoft use the word "smart," be on
the lookout for something dumb

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cabalamat
I think the reason for that is that their products are designed for PHBs not
techies.

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jluxenberg
This applies to Chrome as well, FYI.

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est
> jimrhoskins 13 points 6 hours ago[-]

> Chrome does it too, FYI

> permalink report reply

<http://www.reddit.com/comments/ee4zc/_/c17gc36>

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brc
I've seen this in countless webservers. I'm guessing it must be part of a
server package or something because the wording is always the same.

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studer
Resin (and possibly others):

[http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#LjVQoypFBrg/modules...](http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#LjVQoypFBrg/modules/c/src/isapi_srun/protocol.cpp&l=170)

And this has been around since forever. I feel old.

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random42
So, whats the reasoning behind it?

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btn
Short messages are usually of the form "404 - File not Found". These are non-
informative for many users ("what does it mean?"), don't give any recovery
options ("what can I do now?"), and aren't localised.

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moeffju
And this is a perfect example of an uninformative error page. Why they felt
the need to pad it out, I don't know.

~~~
Semiapies
Because it's a default error page intended to be customized.

