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Previous: Jean label logo | Main | Next: Route 95/128 sign in Massachusetts
December 6, 2005 12:03 AM
Broken: GPS For Less terms and conditions page
Steve Marshall writes in:
I just bought some stuff from GPS for less. I found that before you purchase the items, it displays a terms and conditions page, where the terms and conditions are displayed as white text on a white background...and you thought grey text was hard to read!
Actually I think the text is in clear font, thus avoiding the white on white conundrum, and, come on, who wants to mess up the style on their site with words anyways?
Strangely enough, the terms and conditions are only hidden in Firefox. They appear in Opera and IE.
Looking at the source, it's obvious that it was generated with some MS Office tool. Amusingly, they also try to block right-clicking in IE, giving you a javascript error message saying, "This page is protected !"
It seems submitter needs to update firefox....
(talking about the red arrow on the top right of the cap)
I must say... that design is truly inspired (pardon the pun on the developer http://www.inspired-designs.co.uk/ ).
The geniuses clearly state in their CSS that the body is {color:#fff;background-color:#fff;}. They then say that the text in question is class:MsoNormal, where the Mso stands for Microsoft Office. Somehow, I'm not surprised that non-ms products don't support the msonormal class.
Would it really kill them to have the default color and the default background be something legible?
I want to know how Steve figured this out to begin with! I never would've thought of selecting the area...
Glenn: If this page was about ordering I would vote for stupidity. But since white-on-white is apparently used only on the terms and conditions screen, they must want you to remain ignorant of T&Cs that are to their advantage so I vote for malice.
BLEH!
After looking at the source of that frame, I want to PUKE. MS FrontPage declares the font size FOR EVERY LINE!
Why?
You'd think it'd look and say, "hey, all the lines before this one have the exact same font!", just like a human would.
In fact, that whole frame doesn't need any styling at all; it's just plain text!
FrontPage is the nemesis of web development!
Yes, this is an incredibly bad page, but the error causing the white-on-white layout is very simple & easy to overlook. It is from entering an attribute similar to ''. Unfortunately, that is incorrect, as it omits the '#' before the value (''). While IE ignores this and displays it in the specified color anyway, FireFox interperets the code literally, as it should, and ignores the attribute because it contains an invalid value. (If u use Macromedia Dreamweaver, u know exactly what im talking about) It is a very simple error, but should have been quickly corrected.
That is an excellent insight, Roger! I may have to withdraw my vote for malice and change it to stupidity!
The W3C HTML validator finds 249 errors in the "fixed" page, 140 of which are unique.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gpsforless.co.uk%2Ftsandcs.php
Oh great. Now it's white text on an absolutely hideous shade of purple.
For the LOVE of PETE! BLACK ON WHITE! It's a blinkin' legal document for Pete's sake. This is not the place for "Art."
Not to mention, why the heck is it in its own scrollable pane? All that does is encourage people NOT to read it, because they don't have to scroll their browser window down to reach the Accept button.
Feh.
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Jean label logo | Main | Next: Route 95/128 sign in Massachusetts
What terms and conditions, I see no terms and conditions.
Posted by: john russell at December 6, 2005 12:39 AM