Custom 404 pages - IE5

[nemesis]

OK, I read the discussions about Custom 404 pages and IE5. I know that there is an option to turn this off, but it's only us techheads that do it, since it's enabled by default. We just had a major redesign and changed all our .html's to .shtml's and were relying on our 404 page to tell them that. Now we've discovered that our custom 404 page isn't overriding IE5's page, which means we're losing the people who come to an old .html page (including the old index page) with IE5 -- that's a lot of people. :(

I read that you need to have the 404 page over 512 bytes in order to override this setting, but it still happens to us even though our .shtml page is 5K without the images / includes -- it come to 16K by the time it gets to the browser.

Any ideas on this? I turned the "friendly errors" option back on for my testing, and found that on most sites I tested (my own, Charisma-Carpenter.com (which is also FQ hosted) , SlayMe.com, Deja.com, and others...), I'm getting the defaults -- even though they do have custom 404 pages (which I checked by then going back with the "friendly errors" disabled). But with some sites (Yahoo.com, Ask.com, SGI.com), I do get their custom 404 pages overriding[nbsp][nbsp]IE5's "friendly" page. I don't see anything in their source that shouts "here's some code to make this show in IE5." Does anyone know the secret that they know, or is it just a fluke that theirs work while mine won't?

---Jeremy
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The Complete Buffy Episode Guide
www.buffyguide.com (http://www.buffyguide.com)

[Justin]

I wonder if they have hacked their web servers to not send a 404 header to the browser - eg, trick the browser into seeing it as an ordinary page, and not an error page...

I don't know of a method of doing this off hand on a shared system, but there may be a way via .htaccess... then again there may not. I won't know without doing a bit of research. But that would be the best way to make sure it shows up - the browser has no way of knowing it's an error page if you don't tell it :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest (http://www.FutureQuest.net/index.php) Support

[nemesis]

Please, please, please look into this and thanks for the quick response. I'm searching into this too, but all I'm finding is that it needs to be over 512 bytes.

Thanks,

Jeremy

[Dan Kaplan]

I could be wrong, but I don't seem to have that problem on my site (run-down.com), it goes to the 404 page just fine for mis-typed file names or directories.[nbsp][nbsp]I haven't done anything special to it; it's about 15-20k of regular ol' .shtml page.

Dtour

[nemesis]

Dan,

In the Advanced Tab of Internet Options, do you have "Show Friendly HTTP Error Messages" checked? Because we get your custom 404 if it isn't checked and we get IE's "Friendly" one if it is checked: The exact same problem we have. (BTW, the default for IE5 is to have this checked, which is what really sucks.)

Jeremy
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The Complete Buffy Episode Guide
www.buffyguide.com (http://www.buffyguide.com)

[Dan Kaplan]

No, I have it checked just like the default....[nbsp][nbsp]There must be something else coming into play.[nbsp][nbsp](Justin, remember my #1 complaint of IE -- it seems to have slightly different characteristics with every computer it's installed on, although that appears greatly minimized in versions 5+)

Dan

[Hunkorama417]

I have the "Show Friendly HTTP Error Messages" box checked too and I typed in http://www.fbhm.com/garbage and received my custom 404 error page. I think it has something to do w/ the headers too as my error pages are controlled via a cgi script which logs and sends an e-mail to me. Anyway, when I was reading something at php.net I noticed this code example

header("http/1.0 404 Not Found");

In my CGI scripts I'm not sending any headers, just printing HTML. So, maybe if you control your error page by a cgi script or php script without the header you might see your custom 404 error pages.

Hope this helps.
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Bill Gates Bill Gates
A man full of greed and hate.

He likes to take your money
When he writes new software for his company.

[Dan Kaplan]

I don't think that's it, either...[nbsp][nbsp]Jeremy's getting the IE error page with my site, while I'm getting my custom 404 page, and both of us have "Show Friendly HTTP Error Messages" checked.[nbsp][nbsp]It seems it has to be something browser related to explain the inconsistencies within the same site.

Dan