Surfing the Internet can be frustrating when you get a lot of errors. It’s even more frustrating when you don’t know what an error means. "404 File Not Found," isn’t exactly enlightening, if you ask me.
Sometimes you’ll get errors for an obvious reason: your connection to the Internet has a problem. For example, sometimes when I surf the Web, my dial up connection will inexplicably slow to a crawl. Some pages will take so long to load that they just won’t work at all. Or sometimes the ISP will drop the connection completely. In this situation, sometimes it’s not immediately obvious what’s going on. The best thing to do is just redial and try again.
Sometimes, the problem is not you. When you surf the net, you are visiting pages stored on Web servers. A Web server is just another computer. And like any other computer, servers crash or have other technical problems that require many nerds to fix. If the server is having problems, so will you. For example, suppose you attempt to surf to a site that you know exists, such yahoo.com, but it doesn’t work. Go back later, after the nerds have worked their server magic and you’ll find it again.
Other times, you get an error because a particular page on a site is bad. Generally this is the fault of the person who programmed the page. For example, if the person who created the site typed the link incorrectly into the HTML code that makes up the page, the link won’t work. One typo and the hyperlink is bogus. Links also break as the sites they link to die or rearrange their pages. Some sites use a scripting language such as JavaScript to create their links. As with an HTML link, if the programmer codes the script incorrectly, the link won’t work.
Sometimes you can see what the problem is with the link. If you hover over a link in Internet Explorer, the URL shows in the status bar below. It’s really easy to code the http:// part wrong or other obvious errors, so sometimes you can type the correct URL into the address line and find the page just by guessing at what the link should have been.
If you do encounter one of those cryptic numerical errors, here’s what they mean. A 404 Not Found error means that the requested link is broken (i.e., the page isn’t there or the link is bogus). Another less common error is a 500 internal server error, which indicates a software problem on the server. A 401 unauthorized error means you’ve run across a password protected area. Without the password, you can’t read the page.
If you are really determined to find a page and a link doesn’t work, you also can try typing in a shortened URL. For example, if you are looking for http://www.logicalexpressions.com/editing.htm, you won’t find it because there is no such page. However, if you go back up to the top level, http://www.logicalexpressions.com and click the Editing/Design link, you find that it goes to http://www.logicalexpressions.com/edit.htm.
Like the files on your hard disk, the files on a Web server are just files in folders. If you really want to find a page, it’s just like finding any other file. Sometimes you just have to do a little sleuthing to figure out where it is.