Access Denied

David Dorn got an error message from a Web server that made him wonder what on earth the webmaster had been drinking... and provides an example of one of things you should never do as a Webmaster

I spend a lot of time on the Worldwide Web - it comes with the territory - and as such, I've seen an awful lot of websites. But one I surfed to yesterday while I was trying to find some information about a particular software package - and this was a piece of research that could have earned its author quite a bit of money - delivered such an insulting error message that I was totally aghast!

So much so, in fact, that I captured the HTML for the page it threw up, which I'll reproduce here for your delectation:

What do you make of that? Effectively, this system operator has blocked 90% of his potential traffic from ever getting to his site. Now, I know how easy it is to slip a little JavaScript into a Web page to identify which browser your reader is using, and divert him or her to a suitable page. That's one thing - and it's not a bad idea if you're serving up some clever scripting - but to set up the server to reject requests from a particular set of browsers (the set that just happens to be the biggest, and includes every AOLer) is, to my mind, bordering on lunacy.

I can see a situation where you might want to keep a Web site select, for a very small set of closely defined users - a closed user group, if you will. I suppose you could use this technique and let your users know that they must use, for instance, Opera, and set it to announce itself with a particular set of completely non-standard parameters. That seems like a lot of work, though, and isn't particularly secure.

No, this guy is simply being bloody-minded. He's got a bee in his bonnet about Internet Explorer or AOL - or both - and he's making his own personal preferences known.

Well, if he's reading this, he may as well know that he's lost himself a potentially big chunk of business. How arrogant!

David Dorn