THE ART OF THE 404 PAGE

Well let’s start from the beginning and break this down.

It all started in the 1980′s when a group of scientists at CERN in Switzerland started to work on what was to become the World Wide Web.

In a building, in the office room 404, they stored the World Wide Web’s central database. Any request for a file was routed to that room, where a few people would manually locate the file and transfer it. As time went on the number of requests grew and subsequently so did the number of requests that could not be fulfilled. Usually this was because the person who requested a file typed in the wrong name for that file. These faulty requests were answered with a standard message: ‘Room 404: file not found’.

Later, the manual processes were automated and people could directly query the database but the error message remained the same ’404: file not found’. The room number still remains in the error code when displayed on a browser today.

The first 4 indicates a client error. The server is saying that you’ve done something wrong, such as misspell the URL or request a page which is no longer there. The middle 0 refers to a general syntax error. This could indicate a spelling mistake. The last 4 just indicates the specific error in the group of 40x errors, which includes the 401 Unauthorized error.

With all history the 404 page has come on leaps and bounds (in design). So please enjoy the selection of errors I have chosen below.

And of course…