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.
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.
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!