Error 404: History and legends
There are many legends that revolve around the 404 error, that is, that rather annoying warning screen that appears when you are trying to open a page on a site but the resource in question is not found. Basically, the error message tells us that the address entered was not found on the given server.
Why 404?
The official and most credible story concerns the World Wide Web Consortium, that is, whoever is responsible for defining the standards thanks to which the Web works, which at the time prepared a series of possible communication messages between the computer requesting a web page and the server on which these documents are stored.
There are several groups of messages, each identified with three-digit codes starting with a number ranging from 1 to 5 (1xx Information, 2xx Success, 3xx Redirection, 4xx Client Error, 5xx Server Error).
For example:
100 Continue
101 Switching Protocols
102 Processing
And so on.
There are 51 numbered errors, of which 21 in the 4xx (which also includes the 404).
This error would therefore be nothing more than a progressive number that occurred randomly.
Robert Cailliau (pioneer with Berners-Lee of the hypertext structure that led to the Web) said: “When you write code for a new system, you don’t spend too much time writing long messages for situations where you encounter an error. Also because, at the time, it was convenient to save space and long messages were not practical for this purpose. Modern geeks no longer know what it means to program with 64k of memory. For this reason, finding numerical intervals to indicate errors was the optimal solution. Client errors were listed in the “400” range and thus “404” was an assignment for “Not found.”
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