My first blog post! Today (or whenever you are reading this, future boy) I will be talking about 404 pages and status codes!
The dreaded 404 page
We’ve all had those moments where we are looking for some old piece of media or ancient document, and we come across a long-forgotten link that might just be what we’re looking for and… ERROR 404 file not found! So annoying!
While it can be frustrating to receive such a message, we shouldn’t blame the messenger here. Status codes like that can be incredibly useful in understanding what is happening when a client and server are talking to each other. The 404 status page just alerts us that the resource or page we are trying to access doesn’t exist anymore. But why was this infamous status designated the number 404? Was it random, or is there some reasoning behind it? A bit of both?
Status codes
While the code 404 represents a not found status, there are a whole slew of statuses that can be encountered when using the web. The statuses were grouped into 5 different ranges, where each range indicated a different type of response from the page you were attempting to reach. See the table below.
| Range Start | Range End | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 199 | Indicates “Information responses” |
| 200 | 299 | Indicates “Successful responses” |
| 300 | 399 | Indicates “Redirection messages” |
| 400 | 499 | Indicates “Client error responses” |
| 500 | 599 | Indicates “Server error responses” |
Ah, now we have some context to the not found status code 404. It lies within the 400 to 499 range, so it is some form of client error. Okay cool, then what about the last two numbers? What do they tell us? Not much as far as I can tell, it is just the 5th (00, 01, 02, 03, 04) client error status that was added I guess.
Be sure to check out my other findability blog posts!
https://i-dunno.live/blog/microformat/
https://i-dunno.live/blog/seo-utilities-and-tools/
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