I have seen 404 web pages. You have seen 404 web pages. One 404 page was not 404 but it called itself 404.
Reading the Johanna Rothman’s blog post ‘What is Adaptability?’, I entered into 404 zone after clicking the hypertext ‘this report’. Noticing the URL it add two web addresses in address bar. The URL in address bar was as below.
This made me to test further for this behavior. I started to browse the http://chapnet.army.mil website and it was redirecting to this URL http://chapnet.chaplaincorps.net . Now I got much more curious seeing all this. I could not locate the PDF file easily in redirected URL. To ease my approach in testing this behavior, I decided to use Google dorks and find the crawled PDF’s in this website.
Used below mentioned dorks and observed the corresponding results.
- inurl: www.chapnet.army.mil/
- This showed me the PDF files in result. Hence decided to filter the result to list PDF files only using below dork.
- inurl: www.chapnet.army.mil/ filetype:pdf
- This showed me the list of PDF files. But I did not find the file I was looking for. This made me to think file do not exist so 404 page is observed.
- But clicking on the hypertext ‘this report’ in the blog post opened new tab in browser having two web addresses. This made me to look into the hypertext details.
- browser adds http by default to web URL.
- in this case it added http but it add two web addresses.
- noticed the word ‘WordPress’ in footer of the blog.
- looked like the hypertext was looking into local space of blog poster so it included the hosting .blog URL along with target URL in newly opened tab.
- I see subdomain in the target URL i.e. chapnet.
- but having just www in the target URL it did not work.
- www is a folder structure which can point to a specific folder on a machine(server), and it is not a mandatory in web address. Same machine can host www, ftp, and smtp services or on different machines as well. To access other than www services, we explicitly mention the protocol with domain name or IP address. Ex: ftp.intellectualtester.com
- but having http is mandatory in the URL as web communicates on this.
- adding the http for target URL in html code, it opened PDF file. Two web addresses were not found in newly opened tab and 404 was not observed. It had only target URL.
<a href="www.chapnet.army.mil/pdf/RR1844_Adaptive%20Ldrs.pdf" target="_blank">this report </a>
When I hovered the mouse on this URL in Developer Toolbar, it showed me screen tooltip having below URL and newly opened tab showed the same. That is, ahref tag has different URL and new tab has different URL.
www.createadaptablelife.com/www.chapnet.army.mil/pdf/RR1844_Adaptive%20Ldrs.pdf
Analyzing the differences in the URL I’m seeing in HTML code and newly opened tab, http was missing in the HTML code. Edited the HTML code and added http so the URL became as below.
<a href="http://www.chapnet.army.mil/pdf/RR1844_Adaptive%20Ldrs.pdf" target="_blank">this report </a>
Now clicking on hypertext ‘this report’, it opened the PDF file in new tab. This was surprising behavior for having http in URL of HTML code. Analyzing further noticed,
The author of the blog have fixed this behavior by identifying it herself. I see http added now in target URL. I paired up with Ravi for investigating this 404.
200: 404 is HTTP Status Code which conveys Not Found and further requests from client is allowed. What is 200?
