4 ms·
The problem is that you have to know exactly what has gone wrong to show a proper message. But if you know what is wrong, most of the time the correct action is
by SilverRed 5y ago
The problem is that you have to know exactly what has gone wrong to show a proper message. But if you know what is wrong, most of the time the correct action is to fix the program so it does not go wrong instead of showing a better error.
With the main exception of user submitted data validations where it is up to the user to submit correct data. For the average web service, there the error is a stack trace and there is nothing the user can do so a blank screen with a "something went wrong, we have logged this erorr" is the only real option.
- bombcar 5y agoEven if there’s usually nothing the user can do I still like to have all the stack traces, etc visible - because sometimes there’s enough of a hint that you can get a workaround. A number of DNS failures I’ve worked around with the hosts file.
- gowld 5y agoYou've worked around server-side DNS failures?
- bombcar 5y agoYes - often the DNS issue is unrelated to the server itself - and sometimes a quick lookup shows an obvious cname error - or shows a round-robin dns where the response you have is failing but the others work. Or if the host name has .eu.domain or something else indicating a geographic location changing that can get around a localized failure sometimes.