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An OpenJS Foundation Project

No small error pages

No small error pages (no-friendly-error-pages)

no-friendly-error-pages warns against using custom error pages with byte size under a certain threshold.

Why is this important?

Internet Explorer 5-11 will show its custom error pages instead of the site provided ones to avoid terse server error messages such as Error - 400 being shown to users.

The custom error pages are displayed whenever the response body’s byte length is shorter than:

  • 256 bytes for responses with the status code: 403, 405, or 410
  • 512 bytes for responses with the status code: 400, 404, 406, 408, 409, 500, 501, or 505

Similar behavior existed in older versions of other browsers, such as Chrome.

Although it’s possible for users of Internet Explorer to disable the Show friendly HTTP error messages functionality, it is not typical.

What does the hint check?

The hint looks at all responses and checks if any of them have one of the status codes specified above and their body’s byte length is under the required threshold.

Additionally, the hint will try to generate an error response (more specifically a 404 response), if one wasn’t found.

Examples that trigger the hint

Response with the status code 403 and the body under 256 bytes:

HTTP/... 403 Forbidden

...
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>403 Forbidden</title>
    </head>
    <body>This page has under 256 bytes, so it will not be displayed by all browsers.</body>
</html>

Response with the status code 500 and the body under 512 bytes:

HTTP/... 500 Internal Server Error

...
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error</h1>
        <p>This page has under 512 bytes, therefore, it will not be displayed by some older browsers.</p>
    </body>
</html>

Examples that pass the hint

Response with the status code 403 and the body over 256 bytes:

HTTP/... 500 Internal Server Error

...
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>HTTP 403 - Forbidden</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>HTTP 403 - Forbidden</h1>
        <p>......................................................................</p>
        <p>This page has over 256 bytes, so it will be displayed by all browsers.</p>
        <p>......................................................................</p>
        <p>......................................................................</p>
    </body>
</html>

Response with the status code 500 and the body over 512 bytes:

HTTP/... 500 Internal Server Error

...
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>HTTP 500 - Internal Server Error</h1>
        <p>......................................................................</p>
        <p>This page has over 512 bytes, so it will be displayed by all browsers.</p>
        <p>......................................................................</p>
        <p>......................................................................</p>
    </body>
</html>

How to use this hint?

This package is installed automatically by webhint:

npm install hint --save-dev

To use it, activate it via the .hintrc configuration file:

{
    "connector": {...},
    "formatters": [...],
    "hints": {
        "no-friendly-error-pages": "error",
        ...
    },
    "parsers": [...],
    ...
}

Note: The recommended way of running webhint is as a devDependency of your project.

Further Reading