[thelist] Search engines and dynamic sites using query strings

[Daniel J. Cody]

ya, thats what its passing. The only time we've seen problems is when we 
first rolled out the site..

Some people complained about getting 404 errors in various versions of 
IE on various versions of windows..

Thanks to another innovation from Microsoft, "Friendly Error Messages", 
people that had the 'show friendly error' messages checked in the 
options - which is default too none the less - get the 'page not found' 
error at times. its wack though, because people that do have the option 
for friendly error messages on don't always get 404 errors. from all the 
testing i've done, and others have reported, it isn't something that can 
be duplicated at any one time..

but for browsers other than wack combos of IE and windows, it isn't a 
problem.

(an aside here, but the 'friendly' error message in IE is only supposed 
to show if the error message produced by the server is less than 512 
bytes in size, which we're obviously not. *sigh*)

.djc.

aardvark wrote:

>> From: "Daniel J. Cody" <djc at starkmedia.com>
>> 
>> The only problem i've seen with this is that each request for a file is 
>> actually, a 404. Thus apache will treat it that way and log it as a 404 
>> and some analyzers will report that all of your page views were actually 
>> 404's without some custom analyzing :)
> 
> 
> so, is it passing a 404 header?
> 
> wait, it is (using http://www.delorie.com/web/headers.html):
>   HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
>   Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2001 15:31:10 GMT
>   Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) @PACKAGE@/@VERSION@
>   Page-Completion-Status: Normal
>   Connection: close
>   Content-Type: text/html
> 
> is that a problem for any browsers?