Don, thats to tell you the “not found error” loaded correctly! At least thats what the Firstclass developers intended.
When you put up a 404 page, please check to make sure that the HTTP result code is actually 404. Are your site’s 404 pages really 404? | Don Marti
I had a similar issue with Firstclass when I used to do consulting work for Milken Community High School. Firstclass is a GUI BBS system from the early 90s, turned web server / CMS in the late 90s. It is (or at least was) popular in the K-12 education sector. At one point while working for Milken, I wrote a script to crawl the site and check for broken links. However, in Firstclass if you setup a custom 404 page, the page will claim to be a 404 page, but the http headers show a 200 code.
When I called up Firstclass support to ask why someone would ever do that, they indicated that the 200 was accurate as it was indicating that the 404 error page loaded correctly! Good job Firstclass, way to read the specs. Firstclass is now owned by OpenText, so I’m hoping they got their act together in recent releases.
technorati tags:404s, 404, error, 200, web, server, http, firstclass
Yes, the 404 should be about the underlying resource, not about whether the software was able to “find itself.” And that’s not just files or database rows — if you write a web app to weigh your hamster, and your hamster escapes, the app should come back with a 404 so you can handle the error before the cat does.