Re: Bug#55822: MS IE nasty impact on Custom Error Docs

[Martin Kraemer <ma...@mch.sni.de>]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2000 at 11:04:47AM +0200, Brock Rozen wrote:
> The later versions of MSIE come with a setting to provide so-called 
> "Friendly" error messages. They are friendlier than "HTTP 1.0 Error 404 Not 
> Found", but hardly a delight -- and they don't compare with what you provide.
> 
> Here's the problem: if a user has this option checked (and I think it's the 
> default), then the so-called "friendly" error message _takes_precedence_ 
> over the page you'd like to deliver. As soon as MS IE hears "error 404" -- 
> boom, it's overriding the server's message with its own.
> 
> Are you aware of an existing workaround?

As you already mentionend in your other mail,
   http://bugs.apache.org/index.cgi/full/5173
describes this "feature". As my understanding was that the size of the
response mattern, I usually add text like the following to the
"foot.shtml" include file which is pulled into all my ErrorDocuments:

  <!--#if expr="$HTTP_USER_AGENT = /^Mozilla.*MSIE [5-9].*/" -->
   <!--
     I hate the bogus "Feature" of MS Internet Exploder to
     present a stupid default page with no real hint whatsover
     about what actually went wrong. Therefore I must pad this
     document with kilobytes of blurb which doesn't have any meaning.
     Sincerely yours, Martin Kraemer @ mch.sni.de
     ==========================================================
     I hate the bogus "Feature" of MS Internet Exploder to
     present a stupid default page with no real hint whatsover
     about what actually went wrong. Therefore I must pad this
     document with kilobytes of blurb which doesn't have any meaning.
     Sincerely yours, Martin Kraemer @ mch.sni.de
...repeat as often as required...
     ========================================================== -->
  <!--#endif -->

That fills up the document wit stupid comments until n kB are reached.
I was unaware of the fact that response delay also matters, however.

> Our ideal would be an option, call it 'noerr', which would tell the server 
> to NOT send an error message back to the browser -- just deliver the new 
> content instead. Thus:
> 
> ErrorDocument 404 /cgi-bin/pagebuild.pl noerr

As the above PR suggests, it is easy to return any desired error code as
long as you call a cgi (redirection to an external URL cannot propagate
the error code either, so that would be an option if you want to always
return 200 Ok). From the (any, not just perl) CGI script, it's as easy
as outputting a "pseudo-HTML MIME header"
    Status: nnn text
where nnn is the return code, and text is the readable explanation of it,
in your case probably "Status: 200 Ok"

I am against the proposal to suppress all error codes by a configuration
option. If M$ breaks HTTP by doing Stupid Things TM with the return code,
I don't want to support their faults.

    Martin
-- 
<Ma...@MchP.Siemens.De>             |     Fujitsu Siemens
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