Why On Earth? Qwest’s Account Login Page

It’s high time I start keeping track of good and bad things I see around the Internet and telling you, my dear readers, about them. So at the risk of throwing stones, or maybe making the Internet a better place to live, I bring you:

Why On Earth Did They Do It That Way?

That challenging trivia question that maybe one of you out there can help shed some light on.

My first target: Qwest’s account login page.

I spied this little beauty on the sidebar.

Qwest's login page, radio buttons in a form instead of links as a way of getting to other sections of the site.

As you can see, it is a series of radio boxes and a “go” button that takes you to other parts of the page.

After sifting through kilobytes of nested tables, Javascript, and spacer GIFs, I found (as I suspected) that the “action” attribute for the form is a Javascript function (looks like some sort of validation), so if Javascript is disabled, the form ceases to function. This raises several questions:

Why on earth is this not a simple list of links?
Why on earth does it need validation?
Why on earth isn’t there a default selection set?
Why on earth is the “action” attribute set to a javascript function, rather than a real page, and the Javascript not set as an “onclick” event on the submission button?

Come on Qwest, you can do better than that.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 12:10 pmand is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Why On Earth? Qwest’s Account Login Page”

Nate Carson said on: March 10th, 2007 at 2:13 am
Amen. I was trying to login to upgrade my internet connection but the page breaks and goes into a java traceback the size of an elephant. I give it my vote as the least navigable big site out there!