And Some Error Messages Are Absolutely Correct

Is this a joke? When I clicked on "The Error Message Collection" on your web site, this happened:

ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

(%d)

While trying to retrieve the URL http//error_introduction.html/

The following error was encountered

Invalid URL

Some aspect of the requested URL is incorrect. Possible problems

Missing or incorrect access protocol (should be `http//'' or similar)

Missing hostname

Illegal double-escape in the URL-Path

Illegal character in hostname; underscores are not allowed

Your cache administrator is cachemaster@strath.ac.uk.

Generated Wed, 17 May 2000 215418 GMT by lira.cc.strath.ac.uk (Squid/2.3.STABLE2)

I'm pretty sure it's a joke!!! Isn't it?!!

If it's not, you ought to be ashamed!!

Love the site, by the way!

Submitted by: Alistair Brown 

In this case, the error report is not only accurate but very through -- a pity that this doesn't occur more often. In this case, my compliments to the programmer.

And, no, it was not a joke -- unless the joke's on me -- just a plain old human error (with a little help from some software with unfortunate defaults) ... What happened was the hyperlink (since corrected) was set as http://Error_Introduction.html where it should have appeared as simply Error_Introduction.html -- without the http://.

The problem here is simply that FrontPage 2000 -- the html editor used to prepare these pages -- appears unwilling to admit that hyperlinks might be purely local and, instead, tries to define all links using the http:// preface. My error was in overlooking this instance and not removing the preface instruction. 

Hopefully, this is the only instance of such an error.

But thanks for the catch because ...

... even Jove nods ...

 

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