The Gap becomes The Endless Loop
Recently, the tech press has been all excited about The Gap Inc’s newest uber-ecommerce standards-compliant redesign of their various brand sites. Sadly, if you happen to visit one of these sites in say Apple’s very popular and standards-compliant browser, Safari, you end up in an endless loop of redirect after redirect.
It would seem, in the midst of Gap’s standards-compliant one-page-shopping-cart-wonder, they felt the need to serve a “special” version of their site for those surfing with something besides, umm, MSIE. If we could reach the site, we would find that Gap’s $10,000,000 redevelopment is an impressive demonstration of AJAX and the potential that the future holds for browser-based applications. However, it is a sad statement that as we reach towards Web 2.0, we have such blatant examples of standards-noncompliant development failures.
Web standards promise us the ability to develop and deliver content to an ever expanding list of devices by relying on non-browser-specific code, thus letting the content be the focus. To learn more about standards-based design and how it can help your business, you should drop us an email and check out a few places like Web Standards Project and A List Apart.
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