error-message-examples

Error Message Examples

Contributors

• Evan Prodromou

Introduction

Examples of error messages published as chunks of readable (X)HTML by Web applications.

Examples

Note that many of these examples are failed logins; they're just the easiest kind of error to generate.

• MediaWiki failed login

<div class="errorbox">
   <h2>Login error:</h2>
   Incorrect password or confirmation code entered. Please try again.
 </div>

• WordPress, failed to enter required fields in comment

<p>Error: please fill the required fields (name, email).</p>

• PayPal , trying to send negative dollars.

<div class="messageBox error">
 <p>Some required information is missing or incomplete. Please correct your entries and try again.</p>
 <ul><li>Please enter an amount greater than zero.</li></ul>
 </div>

• Google apps login error

<div class="errormsg" id="errormsg_0_Passwd">
 Username and password do not match. (You provided XXXXXXXXXX)
 </div>

• Technorati login error

<p class="error">Sorry, the member name and password
 you entered do not match. Please try again.</p>

• Yahoo failed login

<div class="yregertxt"><strong>Invalid ID or password.</strong><br> Please try again.</div>

Open Questions

• How is this significantly different than the plethora of HTTP status codes? Most of the examples currently on this page are just failed logins. DerrickPallas 09:31, 14 Jul 2007 (PDT)
  • 401 Unauthorized
  • 402 Payment Required
  • 403 Forbidden
  • HTTP Status Code Information
  • ...

I used login errors just because they were easy to generate (see note above). It's actually kind of hard, as a user of these services, to generate a database connection error. Form validation errors are a little easier; I used an example from Paypal. I can go back and try to make some other errors happen, if you like, too.

I think that, first of all, many sites don't return a 4xx or 5xx error code when something goes wrong; they return 200 with an HTML error message as part of the content (often a very small part of the content, wrapped with the site's "skin" of header, footer, and navigational HTML). I think there's a case to be made that the response for a POSTed form with a mis-formatted phone number in it should have a status code of 400 or 409, but that's simply not how most Web sites work.

I also think that even if some Web site is perfectly RESTful and uses the correct HTTP status messages religiously, there's still some value in a specific section of the resulting page that defines the actual error. --Evan 21:28, 17 Jul 2007 (PDT)

See Also

• error message brainstorming