Q:: Why is it called a ‘404 Page not found’ error when the browser can’t find a web page?
A: First of all, and I can’t stress enough the importance of this, it should really be called a net page. It is a common fallacy to refer to it as ‘the web’ while in fact it should be called ‘the net’. After all, you don’t see a single spider running around, do you?
Now, when we were researching the possiblities for the world wide net, we originally envisioned a network of 1,024 net pages for our test network. Unfortunately, we never got around to writing so many web pages (people had to do serious work those days — not just write pages blogs and irrelevant opinions). In fact, we only got around to 403. Hence, when you wanted to open page 404 it would say that the page was not found. Simple, isn’t it?
Of course, we demo’d our system to several people, some of which may have taken some ideas from it — although we can’t prove it, and we certainly won’t use any names. Nevertheless, they probably thought that 404 was an actual error code which should be incorporated….In their ‘web’.
So as usual, it’s all easy and simple.
