It's more detailed than that. Here is a posit from a docco fan, would you mind incorporating any interesting or useful bits?
My plate overflows.
Bill
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 27, 2002 2:50 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [info] message for bill rowe
Hi,
I wrote this after following the pointer you gave me. Feel free to use it. I hereby relinquish all rights of authorship in favour of the Apache Project and its associated organisations.
Bob
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CAVEAT WITH RESPECT TO INTERNET EXPLORER AND FRIENDLY ERROR MESSAGES:
When testing a site with Internet Explorer, it is necessary to turn off friendly error messages. A full discussion of this may be found in KB Q294807.
In that article, it is implied that error messages of less than 512 bytes for a 500 status code will be replaced by the friendly error message generated by the browser.
In article KB Q218155, a list of status codes with substitute friendly error messages is given as:
400, 403, 404, 405, 406, 408, 409, 410, 500, 501, 505
It also documents that each of these has an individual message size threshold. The registry key where these values are stored is given.
The end result is that during testing, you must be sure to turn off friendly errors in internet explorer.
Furthermore, if you want to ensure that users see your error page, you must ensure that the length of the html in your error pages be greater than those values found in the registry as modified by the installation of internet explorer. Note that this is exclusive of the length of any images, etc that may be called out in the html
It is the recommendation of the author that developers and designers select a threshold that is comfortably larger than the largest value found in the registry of a reference machine.
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At 09:17 PM 6/6/2002, you wrote:
slive 2002/06/06 19:17:13
Modified: docs/manual/mod core.xml core.html.en Log: At long last, document the MSIE "friendly error message" issue.
I was very diplomatic here. I was tempted to use the apache bully-pulpit to
berate MS over this arrogant mis-feature, but I restrained myself.
Revision Changes Path 1.13 +9 -0 httpd-2.0/docs/manual/mod/core.xml
Index: core.xml =================================================================== RCS file: /home/cvs/httpd-2.0/docs/manual/mod/core.xml,v retrieving revision 1.12 retrieving revision 1.13 diff -u -d -b -u -r1.12 -r1.13 --- core.xml 30 May 2002 13:26:08 -0000 1.12 +++ core.xml 7 Jun 2002 02:17:12 -0000 1.13 @@ -650,6 +650,15 @@ "ErrorDocument 401" directive then it must refer to a local document.</strong></p>
+ <p>Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) will ignore server-generated
+ error messages when they are "too small" and substitute its own
+ "friendly" error messages. The size threshold varies depending on
+ the type of error, but in general, if you make your error document
+ greater than 512 bytes, then MSIE will show the server-generated
+ error rather than masking it. More information is available in
+ Microsoft Knowledgebase article <a
+ href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q294807";>Q294807</a>.</p>
+
<p>Prior to version 2.0, messages were indicated by prefixing
them with a single unmatched double quote character.</p>
</usage>
1.6 +8 -0 httpd-2.0/docs/manual/mod/core.html.en
Index: core.html.en =================================================================== RCS file: /home/cvs/httpd-2.0/docs/manual/mod/core.html.en,v retrieving revision 1.5 retrieving revision 1.6 diff -u -d -b -u -r1.5 -r1.6 --- core.html.en 30 May 2002 13:26:08 -0000 1.5 +++ core.html.en 7 Jun 2002 02:17:12 -0000 1.6 @@ -447,6 +447,14 @@ "ErrorDocument 401" directive then it must refer to a local document.</strong></p>
+ <p>Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) will ignore server-generated
+ error messages when they are "too small" and substitute its own
+ "friendly" error messages. The size threshold varies depending on
+ the type of error, but in general, if you make your error document
+ greater than 512 bytes, then MSIE will show the server-generated
+ error rather than masking it. More information is available in
+ Microsoft Knowledgebase article <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q294807";>Q294807</a>.</p>
+
<p>Prior to version 2.0, messages were indicated by prefixing
them with a single unmatched double quote character.</p>
<p><strong>See also </strong></p><ul><li><a href="../custom-error.html">documentation of
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