Internet Solutions Help

This guide will help you understand and find solutions on the Internet Solutions page. Further below are additional sections:

• Common Internet Related Terms
• Unhide Error Messages in IE

Description - We explain the issue in simple easy-to-understand language with a minimum of acronyms.

Example - When available, we show typical default error screens from the most popular web servers - Windows IIS (Internet Information Services) web server and Apache. Other web servers have similar messages. Web designers have the option to replace the default message and style, so what you see could be quite different. Some messages are exclusive to a specific web server, so only one example may appear.

Occurrences - We rank various internet error messages as to how often they occur. It's a general guideline which compares with other internet issues. Your personal experience could be quite different.

Solutions and Fixes - Here we explain how you can correct the issue. Most solutions include the Solution Analyzer to show how we rate each solution. Often it is nothing you are doing wrong and the issue has to be corrected by the web site designers and/or web server maintenance people.

Official Explanation - This is the original text of the issue. It's usually written for developers and often makes little sense to most users.

Forum Help - Look here to view or add your own comments and solutions. The link goes directly to a thread on this issue, so you don't have to hunt around.

Research This Issue - We've built an immediate search for this specific issue. For this section, you can select different tabs to check results for the entire web, or narrow your search Microsoft's sites, Apache.org, or Sun Microsystems. You can also search Blogs.

Notes - Here we explain which Web servers might show this message. Not all that useful, but some messages are only possible from specific Web servers. Other general notes are included here too.

Flash Player - This is an add-in to most browsers to view flash enabled web sites. These often have more advanced animated graphics, video and sound than is possible with just HTML.

HTML - This is the language of web sites to describe to your browser how text, images and links appear on a page. It stands for Hypertext Markup Language.

JavaScript - is normally an add-in to the browser to allow programming functions within web pages that runs on the users browser (rather than the web server). The end result is a richer web experience. All current browsers include JavaScript, but it can be disabled. Run our Internet Tests to see if JavaScript is enabled. We also have a page to explain how to enable Javascript if yours is disabled.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) - This provides a way to send a user subscribed content which can be video, audio or text. A user subscribes to a "feed" or "channel" and when the content changes, the RSS reader automatically gets the new content for the user.

Web Server - When you access a web site, the pages are delivered from a web server. Popular servers include Microsoft's IIS, Apache and Sun's Java System Web Server.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) - This is a method to structure data, which is used across different types of systems. The "Extensible" part allows developers to extend and expand the language as needed.

By default Microsoft's Internet Explorer (v5, 6 and 7) hide error message content, so you end up having no idea what the error really is. The generic message appears similar to:

This occurs when the message is short (under 512 characters), which hides the real error message. The "more information" in the dialog does not provide any information about the error either. We're not sure what the benefit of this is other than to add to user confusion, although it might be more comforting to novice users. Luckily, you can turn this feature off, which we strongly recommend.

The "feature" is labeled as Show friendly HTTP error messages, but in our opinion it's far from friendly to hide what the real issue is. To fix this issue and see all error messages:

1) In IE, Click on Tools, then Internet Options.

2) Click on the Advanced tab, and scroll down to the option (under the section "Browser") labeled Show friendly HTTP error messages.

3) Toggle the option off (no check-mark as shown above). Click on OK to save the new setting.