Walmart video site gets worse

As you can see, if you go to their video downloading page here, it now properly detects your browser. Yay, progress! Sadly, if you are not using the spyware vector called IE, well, it locks you out. You get the following error message.

The funny part is that it can't even get the error message right. The word wrapping is broken and... and... Like I said, this project would cause a teacher to fail a first time HTML student. If you think the site was written by crack-addled monkeys with blunt head trauma, well, you could be right.

Several readers were kind enough to point out not only that the site is broken, but why it is broken. I do appreciate the effort guys, thanks a bunch. Let the hilarity commence.

i checked that page's source code, what a terrible mess !
that page has 8530 lines of HTML, 6194 of them are empty !
the remaining 2336 contain 528 syntax errors !
it contains TWO doctype tags (a single tag that is supposed to be at the start of the document)
it contains 26 script tags ! (and includes some javascript files as well)
it's a miracle that any browser can display it at all !
one of the problems is that it pretends to be a strict HTML 4 document, but does not respect any of the strict rules.
another problem is that it's generated by many jsp pages, probably written by different people (none of them good at their job)
it contains 117 comments, that should have been removed.
it's not using a style sheet, but the style attribute, very hard to maintain.
it uses attributes that don't exist, or are not supposed to be used in HTML 4 strict
at least 12 tags are not closed.
etc etc...

funnily enough, it looks ok on Opera.... :):)

Note: Several people reported it looked OK in Opera, Safari and others, which makes us wonder about.....

Little inside info
Walmart signed a contract with M$ and made it not work with FireFox. Its not a mistake.

The problem is that the MIME type of the style sheet (generated by jsp) is set to text/plain not text/css.

This is happening because the style sheet is generated dynamically so the web server cannot work it out from the files extension, and so it needs to be set explicitly in the script - which obviously hasn't happened.

Since Exploder is broken it will happily ignore this whereas Firefox will ignore the style sheet, since the script is indicating that it isn't actually a style sheet but plain text.

Not a flame but some info: if you go to URL http://validator.w3.org and type in WalMart's URL (www.walmart.com) you will get a report showing that there are ~298 coding errors on the site and what those errors are.

The site looks fine in Safari and Opera 9.10 on Mac OS 10.4.8, but still, the Firefox rendering is just shameful. And you didn't even talk about the fact that it only offers 640x480 videos and it only works with WinXP or Vista with DRM 10. Mininova is way better...

If you take a peek at the code you see the page was created by what looks like an authoring tool. If I were Omniture I would remove my name ASAP.

"SiteCatalyst code version: G.9.
Copyright 1997-2005 Omniture, Inc.
More info available at http://www.omniture.com"

BTW....this exact page I'm writing you on is broken in FireFox as well. the Top Stories on the right are half over the comments section.

And now the Send button gives me a ASP server error.

Hit Ctrl+F5 on the Wallmart Video site
and all is well in the world (more or less).

hi,

i just spent a little bit of time trying to find out why the site went this terribly wrong.

turns out, that this is presumably one of the worst sites ever written. they use markup that isn't allowed in this doctype, define id's more than once, which is especially daft for a site that uses that much javascript, and use attributes that don't exist.

sry for this little rant but it isn't quite over yet. the first thing you learn when you learn html (well maybe the body tag comes before that) is that you always define the doctype first. before anything else. well done wal-mart, they managed that one! theres even about 10 lines of empty space to make sure it is really on top. second lesson: only define the doctype ONCE! down on line 348 they define the doctype again :(

this is um yea...very very bad code

oh yes and they don't like to close their tags either. and the css validater spat out about 70 mistakes and 1117 warnings.

so, now i'm going to cry and sob in a corner

good bye

(name supplied)

p.s. if i am completely wrong you are very welcome to tell me, i will have another rant with someone else then, thank you :)

Regarding your article "Wal*Mart makes video downloading awful" -- it gets worse.

Continue to buy with IE 7, and you will see that the shopping cart is ActiveX-only. IE 7 blocks the ActiveX control download unless the user allows it. :)

So there you have it, but I must take back what I said earlier, this no crack-addled monkey with blunt head trauma could do something this bad, they have some pride left. Instead you get a case study in what not to do on the web combined with a case study on how not to do it.

With Walmart, you have to have very low expectations, very very low. Walmart has not lived up to the bare minimum requirement. They are making fools of themselves in full public view. Then again, what did you expect, it is Walmart. Maybe they can make a fake blog about the development process so we can see what happened.µ