One surprisingly practical use I found for things like this; when internal tools throw up a 404 or a 503 with the usual default status page, people assume "oh it's not working, I'll try again later".
When they get an unexpected cat (or dog, in this case) they tend to go and ask their tech team, "what's with the cat?" It's not a substitute for good logging and alerting in any way, and is totally unsuitable for environments where internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, but as a way to get people to pay attention when something goes wrong then a cute animal can work a lot better than a "normal" notification.
http.cat is surprisingly useful because of the short url. Typing in e.g. http.cat/422 beats any other method I know for quickly looking up status codes by number.
Just type in "error 422" and a Google snippet tells you what it is. Saves 3 characters, doesn't depend on a single website, and returns a more descriptive paragraph instead of some silly image with no relevance...
I just entered "error 422" into DDG and got a useful result so if you interpret the parent post as "use your favorite search engine" then it doesn't depend on a single website.
And for something non-critical I would rather depend on a quirky independent website than on google. I want the internet to be more than six companies dominating everything.
It's listed, but under geographic TLDs[1] because it's Catalonia's TLD.
Interestingly this TLD only allows website that "to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet"[2] which is why http.cat also offers a Catalan version[3].
Might be okay on a humour site, or perhaps in an internal tool, but some of these are a bit tasteless IMO. It could be far more useful if you were able to pick from a selection of individual images or image sets depending on the usecase. Although even then these kinds of http error images scream early-2000s web humour to me.
> Although even then these kinds of http error images scream early-2000s web humour to me.
I think that's the point and it's a nice throwback :)
But otherwise I agree, https://http.cat/ is far more harmless. Some of those dog pictures would probably not fare well when a less humorous colleague sees them.
I've often wondered why most sites expose these status codes to the end user. The end user does not need to know, and in most cases will probably be confused by it. Plainly worded messages should be presented in the case of errors, not half an RFC.
It makes it a ton easier to assist the user when they come to support (“It’s broken” doesn’t go very far, knowing it’s a 500 for instance can help fast track the demand, whatever the actual problem is).
Of course it doesn’t stop you from rendering a nice and plainly worded error.
At most early projects and cool clients, I'll throw together some goofy custom status pages for internal and sometimes public-facing websites and portals. BSOD, Chuck Norris quote generators, web games like Tetris, and so on.
I'm genuinely surprised at how many people are in some way put off by the images. I wonder if there's a cultural thing about people who dislike dogs generally. These kind of comment streams are always a good reminder about how you can never anticipate other people's responses.
I'd surely crack that joke with close friends, but at work I would absolutely not risk that, especially if I don't know whether the receiving party has a similar humor. Compare that with http.cat:
It's a cute picture of cats. It might get an eyeroll, yes, but nobody is going to accuse me of an inappropriate joke for that. 226 is even worse and I know quite a few female colleagues which would probably not take it well, irrespective of it being a picture of a dog.
When they get an unexpected cat (or dog, in this case) they tend to go and ask their tech team, "what's with the cat?" It's not a substitute for good logging and alerting in any way, and is totally unsuitable for environments where internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, but as a way to get people to pay attention when something goes wrong then a cute animal can work a lot better than a "normal" notification.