Thank the Disney UK Store

Published: 11/21/2005 | Updated: 11/21/2005 | Discuss

While I had my head in code over the past few weeks, I missed a revolt against the Disney UK Store (hat tip to Ryan Williams). Molly has already lashed them for their shameful redesign, and Andy Clarke took a screen shot where you can see them selling… Spacer gifs? Can I have a pound of those to go, please?

Putting aside the fact that netiher CSS nor HTML at Disney UK validate as anything, it offends me that in the year 2005 somebody would whip out an old copy of Visual Studio and try to "design" anything in it. After all that’s been written and said, it’s abnormal to see <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">.

And then you have some clueless people, like Mr. Luke Redpath, come in and say, "OMFG! It’s ASP.NET!" This is really bad rap for the ASP.NET community. We’ve been building up knowledge of web standards, accessibility, usability, etc… but some high-profile site like Disney just has to put a dent in the effort.

I really don’t understand what happened to Disney’s online store, who mutilated it and why. Whoever worked on it really need to get their act together. I can clearly see the hand of former C++ coders behind this. My only advice to them: you’re not coding in C++ anymore like you used to. At minimum, learn proper HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Your excuse "Oh I so hate UI" doesn’t fly anymore.

Btw, can somebody tell me why their home page has a giant view state? The only control with an autopostback on the page is a product picker. Isn’t it taken for granted these days that view state needs to be knocked out on controls which don’t need to maintain it?

Comments

1 Craig Anderson | Monday, November 21, 2005 at 4:31 PM

Isn't it nice that when the Disney Store was a nice, accessible, standards-compliant, pretty little thing, no-one cared to mention that the application was actually built with .NET?

2 Chris Lienert | Monday, November 21, 2005 at 5:48 PM

If you keep reading you'll see I countered... but I still find it unfortunate that, out of the box, ASP.NET is anything but standards compliant - not that this presents any excuse for developers.

As per Craig's comment above, it's clear here that the difference between Andy Clarke's brilliant site and the horrible mess in place now is not the server side technology but the developers.

I've seen some appalling attempts at ASP.NET whereby almost every element is a Viewstate enabled control even when their values are fixed thus creating a massive Viewstate for no good reason. In short, bad code once again...

3 Milan Negovan | Monday, November 21, 2005 at 6:27 PM

Craig, yes, it *is* interesting that the previous version of the site was built with ASP.NET, but this fact somehow didn't get much traction until now. :(

4 Carl Camera | Monday, November 28, 2005 at 12:07 PM

Milan, I started responding to this and I ended up writing an article, so I posted it on my blog.

http://iamacamera.org/default.aspx?section=design&id=32

It doesn't address the home page viewstate, but rather the dilemma the WaSP faces in gaining standards compliance acceptance.

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