Error message
An error message is human-readable diagnostic text that reports a problem or failure encountered during software processing.
Everyday Data Visualization
An error message is user-facing text that explains a failure, its cause, or a possible remedy.
- How it is used
- Guides interactive interfaces toward clear failure explanations and easy recovery.
- How deep it goes
- Explains wording, specificity, tone, placement, and recovery, while stopping short of implementation details.
- Examples
- Uses filtered-out data, missing permissions, generic system notices, and constrained calendar dates as examples.
- What you can do after
- Apply via interface copy that identifies failures, explains causes, and suggests concrete recovery actions.
Read how Everyday Data Visualization explains error message →
Tiny CSS Projects
An error message is user-facing text that explains a validation failure or other problem with an interface action or input.
- How it is used
- Improves form feedback by identifying validation failures, associating them with controls, and delaying them until interaction occurs.
- How deep it goes
- Explains visual styling, accessibility markup, pseudo-element icons, relative units, and dirty-invalid display states.
- Examples
- Uses a contact-form name field, an associated error div, an alert span, an error icon, and dirty-invalid CSS states.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch by styling, associating, hiding, and conditionally revealing accessible form error messages.
Related concepts
- implementation detailaddresses · An implementation detail is an internal design choice, representation, or mechanism that is not part of a software component’s externally observable behavior or contract.
- error codecontrasts with · An error code is a symbolic or numeric value that indicates or identifies an error or failure condition.
- parser.error()produced by · parser.error() is an argparse parser method that reports a command-line parsing error, displays usage information, and terminates the program with a failure status.
- loguses · A log is a record of events, activity, or diagnostic information produced during the operation of a system or process, often ordered by time.
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