In web development, we spend a lot of time talking about progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. From an accessibility standpoint, it’s important; however, there are still experiences on the web that could stand to be improved.
For example, browsing a site, clicking a link, and hitting a 404 can be somewhat of a show stopper. Addy Osmani has an elengant and creative solution for handling just that.
Catch404 is a jQuery and CSS3 plug-in written by Addy Osmani that attempts to soften the blow of hitting a 404.
The implementation is solid: By intercepting the request after clicking a link, the script will perform an Ajax request to determine if the page exists. If so, it will continue; otherwise, it will display a modal.
You can check out a full demo here or download the script from Addy’s blog.
John Saddington says
is this something that we should implement?
Tom says
we don’t have 404’s 🙂
..but seriously, I think it’s got potential for us.