3 ms·

This is right - 404 pages are the right UX when you have a 'stateful' resource that can be deleted, and you need to show that the URL (or ID param within) is co

This is right - 404 pages are the right UX when you have a 'stateful' resource that can be deleted, and you need to show that the URL (or ID param within) is correct, and once pointed to a resource, but now that resource has been permanently deleted and can't be shown any more. In a sense this information conveyed by the 404 page is now the immutable 'resource' that will stay permanently at that URL. Doing a redirect breaks this, it's lossy and usually a bad UX.

hamilyon2 6y ago
"Was here but deleted" has its' own http code now, that is 410 AFAIK.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Has had since 1997 at least, cf. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068 - it's just that nobody uses it.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    It's used in APIs, just not user-facing documents (or rather would-be documents). Too late for that though, while laymen pretty much get '404', introducing a subtly different numeric code to co-exist would be a bit much, I think. And also pretty worthless, anecdotally I think actually displaying big '404' text is on a downward trend, probably because of the prevalence of SPAs/webapps in general.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      Yeah, I mean, for the lay public to have to know what "404" means feels like a side effect of the early web being a frontier. What's important to tell the user is "there's nothing here", and that can and should be done without invoking any magic numbers at all.
- davnicwil 6y ago
  A super useful distinction for APIs for similar reasons. Interesting these statuses are often remapped for the web, where a 410 is often implemented as a 404 like in the scenario I describe and the 'true' 404 is often implemented as a 302.
rakoo 6y ago
Quite the contrary: if the _resource_ still exists but in the older site, the redirection will point the browser to the other location. OP's stratagem is doing exactly what it's supposed to do (if the identifier of a page is its path and not the full URL of course)

hamilyon2 6y ago

"Was here but deleted" has its' own http code now, that is 410 AFAIK.

throwanem 6y ago
Has had since 1997 at least, cf. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068 - it's just that nobody uses it.
- OJFord 6y ago
  It's used in APIs, just not user-facing documents (or rather would-be documents). Too late for that though, while laymen pretty much get '404', introducing a subtly different numeric code to co-exist would be a bit much, I think. And also pretty worthless, anecdotally I think actually displaying big '404' text is on a downward trend, probably because of the prevalence of SPAs/webapps in general.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Yeah, I mean, for the lay public to have to know what "404" means feels like a side effect of the early web being a frontier. What's important to tell the user is "there's nothing here", and that can and should be done without invoking any magic numbers at all.
davnicwil 6y ago
A super useful distinction for APIs for similar reasons. Interesting these statuses are often remapped for the web, where a 410 is often implemented as a 404 like in the scenario I describe and the 'true' 404 is often implemented as a 302.

rakoo 6y ago

Quite the contrary: if the _resource_ still exists but in the older site, the redirection will point the browser to the other location. OP's stratagem is doing exactly what it's supposed to do (if the identifier of a page is its path and not the full URL of course)