When & Why HTTP Status 400 Bad Request Occurs ?

While browsing through the internet in our daily life, one of the most commonly experienced and encountered error over the internet is the HTTP 400 bad request. There may be various situations during the daily use of the internet by you, in which you would have encountered this error. This article gives you an overview about HTTP 400 bad request error, what it is and why is it displayed.

The cycle of a web browsing activity or a web search involves the client computer and the web browser used by at the client side, as well as the web server, where all the resources such as the web pages, images, videos etc accessible over the internet are kept. The client machine requests information from the web server, based on the protocols set by the HTTP, that is the hypertext transfer protocol, and the web server displays the desired files, which can be accessed on the client side using a suitable web browser.

What is HTTP Status 400 Bad Request ?

A HTTP 400 bad request occurs whenever the web server terminates this search cycle and does not allow the client to get access to any particular information requested, owing to a particular reason. In the simplest terms, a HTTP400 bad request occurs when the web server turns down the request of the client to view any particular information, owing to the disobeying of the rules listed under the hypertext transfer protocol. Due to this reason, the clear and concise understanding of the request by the web server could not be established and as a result of this, the HTTP 404 bad request error is often displayed.

Most of the times, the occurrence of a HTTP 400 bad request is suggestive of a bad programming practice at the client’s end or the end of the web server. Such bad practices can be of various different types. At the client’s end, one of the major reasons behind the HTTP 404 bad request’s appearance is due to the incorrect typing of the URL ofthe web resource by the user. In such circumstances, the web server is unable to map the URL request with the address of the desired resource and as a result, it terminates the request. Thus an easy way to rectify the error occurrence in this case is to carefully type the URL of the web resource being requested.

Though it is rarely a reason, but there are situations when such a HTTP 404 bad resource error occurs due to some inherent disabilities of the web server of the website requested. If this is the case, the only possible solution is to notify the webmasters of the website about the occurrence of this problem. The webmasters of any website can be generally contacted using the following email address: webmaster@websitename.com.

There may be other situation where the resource requested by the client could not be accessible owing to some inherent bug. It is the job of the developers in this case to rectify the problem.