Yellow Screen of Death
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The yellow screen of death is a name used for two computer error screens.
[edit] Mozilla
In Mozilla-based applications, the yellow screen of death is the screen displayed when they encounter an XML parsing error. This typically happens when the XML document that the browser is trying to access is not well-formed, for example when it does not nest tags properly.
The yellow screen of death is common when an author of HTML tries to serve HTML as XHTML, with the recommended MIME type of "application/xhtml+xml", without checking for well-formedness.
When it arises due to a web page error, only the page content area displays the yellow screen of death; the browser chrome is unaffected. However, the entire browser window may be replaced with the yellow screen of death in situations where browser code has caused a parsing error (this is almost always the result of a bug in an extension or an extension incompatibility).
[edit] ASP.NET
The yellow screen of death is the colloquial name given to an Exception report screen generated by ASP.NET.
The screen displays the exception message and a stack trace with a yellow background. If the application was running in debug mode it also displays source-code locations in the stack-trace. If the website employed inline server code then it also displays the source code causing the error.
By default, the application's Web.config file tells the server what to do when an unhandled exception occurs, the default is to show a simple error message, as not to reveal any sensitive information about the application's operation to site visitors. The Web.config file can also be used to specify a custom error page or to show the entire error message to all visitors (the default is to only show it to visitors connected to localhost).
