Bad idea. Better would be to tweak it and instead serve a 404 with a recommendation "Maybe you meant X"
Designing a website without 404s
11–20 of 109 posts
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#12Except that URLs are an API surface and congratulations, now you are supporting an infinite API forever.
Vendors change product names, hyperlinks break! Fix bugs or change behavior, hyperlinks break! Do nothing, believe it or not, hyperlinks break!
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#13I have to question how many people in 2024 are navigating the internet by going to the address bar and typing “foo.com/thing-im-looking-for”
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#14> I am surprised that more websites do not implement it Maybe because it is not a good idea. Masking errors is harmful. The information "what you're looking for is not there" is very important, because it lets users identify that something is wrong. Smart redirection can be outright dangerous: what if I am buying a medication, and the smart website silently replaces the correct drug with something similar but wrong?…
I agree with these points, but the "U" is Uniform:
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#15> I am surprised that more websites do not implement it Maybe because it is not a good idea. Masking errors is harmful. The information "what you're looking for is not there" is very important, because it lets users identify that something is wrong. Smart redirection can be outright dangerous: what if I am buying a medication, and the smart website silently replaces the correct drug with something similar but wrong?…
Most people who use this site would use the search bar, which reports errors, and those who directly type it in aren't exactly laypeople.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#16> the implementation is so simple that I am surprised that more websites do not implement it I might be wrong but for me it’s because IRL this isn’t an issue. Users shouldn’t be finding/using random URLs to navigate the site. Where is this broken URL traffic coming from anyway? Are you trying to solve for people that randomly edit the URL and expect it work, most people don’t care about those users getting 404 becaus…
Link rot is a thing. Scroll around some older reddit threads with links and see how many of them are still active. Site redesigns are often the cause of older links rotting to become no longer valid.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#17WordPress does this sort of thing, or at least can (I don’t know, I’ve only ever been involved with a couple of WordPress sites). It’s obnoxiously awful. You end up with people accidentally relying on non-canonical URLs that subsequently change in meaning, or using links that seem to work but actually give the wrong content and you don’t notice. Both of these are very often much worse than a 404. There’s also an issue where articles can become inaccessible from their correct URLs, due to something else taking precedence in some way; I wouldn’t say that’s fundamental to the technique, but I do think that the philosophy encourages system designs where this can happen. (Then again… it’s WordPress, which is just all-round awful, technically; maybe I shouldn’t blame the philosophy.)
So no, please don’t ever do this.
But what you can do is provide a useful 404 page. Say “there’s no page at this URL, but maybe you meant _____?” Although there’s a strong custom of 404 pages being useless static fluff, you are actually allowed to make useful 404 pages. Just leave it as a 404, not a 3xx.
(Also, care about your URLs and make sure that any URL that ever worked continues to work, if the content or an analogue still exists at all. Distressingly few people even attempt this seriously, when making major changes to a site.)
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#18This really isn't crowing but we created a dynamic site that used HyperCard as a CGI and we did that in 1984. Not kidding. Mosaic'd up to the hilt.
Still, it's a good idea.
You can further this idea (especially when the slug returns nothing) by having this page also list "Best Bets" or what people most often come to your site for (regardless of any search query, perhaps, with their referrer, or on this day of the week etc)
And additionally, put the slug (bar the dashes) into a search box so it might be ammended (but tell them that you didn't find anything and they need to try something else).
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#19This just seems like it's co-opting the url into a "search". Just have a normal search page where users can type in what they want if they want fuzzy matching. Or have the 404 page contain a search page. I don't think using the url as a "fuzzy search" is the right application.
You can do this and still 404, even. There is rarely a good reason not to 404 when you don’t recognize the URL, even if you want to try to do something helpful with the 404 page.
Re: Designing a website without 404s
#20I'm struggling to understand the real-world benefit to this. Do most people even manually type URLs (especially long ones which would lend themselves to mistyping)?