karlcow

Opening The Web one bug at a time

HTTP Code Survey

Thursday, September 8, 2011 2:48:56 PM

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Because I had a bit of data and, as I said previously, this is a dirty survey. I looked at the Alexa top 500 Web sites. More surprises.

 
 325 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  65 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  33 HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  22 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
  16 HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
   4 HTTP/1.1 405 MethodNotAllowed
   4 HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
   3 HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
   2 HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
   2 HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
   2 HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
   2 HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
   2 HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
   2 HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
   1 HTTP/1.1 405 Request method 'HEAD' not supported
   1 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
   1 HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
   1 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
   1 HTTP/1.1 200 Ok
   1 HTTP/1.0 503 no backend
   1 HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden
   1 HTTP/1.0 302 Found


Now I really want to look deeper and more properly to these data. Little project next week?

PS: Note that the reason phrase (the part after the 3 digits code) is optional. User agents do not have to rely on it. It is a message for humans to make the response more human friendly.

HTTP Etag surveyFlex your box

Comments

huxr Saturday, September 10, 2011 4:15:18 PM

User friendliness of error messages are unlikely to significatly improve for a long time.

Karl Dubostkarlcow Saturday, September 10, 2011 4:29:28 PM

huxr, which error messages?

huxr Saturday, September 10, 2011 6:37:51 PM

Ok, not all HTTP response status codes are error messages. Some are.

But as far as non-techie users are concerned, when they are exposed to such a response, it is not nice from the other parties (the servers)
.

I guess I wasn't strictly on-topic. (I don't even know the exact point of your test.)

But I'm only a passive (read-only) semi-geek with a usability axe to grind. smile Don't mind my humble fumblings. smile

Karl Dubostkarlcow Tuesday, September 13, 2011 1:45:07 PM

For users you can display whatever you want in the BODY. The HTTP response status is not visible to users but only to clients. There is nothing which forbids you to send a more verbose/helpful message in the viewport smile

The survey above (not a test) was to see how different the messages were from those given in the specification. And if some were totally misleading. It might be revealing for some how people understand the code.

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