Back in August of 2006, I published Redirection with Smoke And ... Smoking. Among other things, the article described what the experience was like for visitors to Marlboro.com:

If you were using something other than Internet Explorer, you likely experienced a familiar sight: a blank page as a result of the site being coded for IE only. In and of it self, that's not too big of a deal, even for #20 on the Fortune 500 List, Altria.

The fun part, however, was why Marlboro.com only worked in IE. To redirect visitors to actual content, they programmatically set the HREF property of a hyperlink on the page and then executed the (IE-Only) click() method on that hyperlink. That meant a noticible redirect for Internet Explorer and a dead page for everyone else.

Here's what the code looked like back in 2006:

<html>
<head>
<meta name="GENERATOR" Content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1">
<title>Coupons and special offers from Marlboro</title>
  <meta name="keywords" content="marlboro cigarettes, marlboro miles" />
  <meta name="description" content="" />
</head>
<script language=javascript>
<!--
function redirect()
{
  var anchorObj = document.getElementById("target1");
  anchorObj.href = "http://smokersignup.com/signup/index.jsp?pc=MAR2006";
  anchorObj.click();
}
//-->
</script>
<body onload="javascript:redirect();">
  <a id="target1" href="#"></a>
</body>
</html>

 

And here's what the page looks like today:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
    <title>Coupons and special offers from Marlboro.</title>
<script language="javascript">
function redirect()
{
    var name = navigator.appName;
    if(name == "Microsoft Internet Explorer") {
        try {document.getElementById("link").click();}catch(ex){loc();}
    }
    else {
        loc();
    }
    setTimeout("check()",1000);
}

function loc()
{
    location = "http://www.smokersignup.com/signup/index.jsp?pc=MAR2006";
}

function check()
{
    document.getElementById("the_div").style.display = "block";
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="redirect()">

<div id="the_div" style="display:none;">
    Redirecting...
    <br />
    <br />
    If your browser does not redirect you momentarily, please click 
    <a id="link" href="http://www.smokersignup.com/signup/index.jsp?pc=MAR2006">here</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Without compromosing their original vision — the pioneering idea of redirection via simulated mouse click — they've added some features:

  • It now works in non-IE browsers, thanks to the try/catch and the new loc() function,
  • it now has a teases the user via setTimeout, making the user's anticipation and excitement grow for a full second until they're redirected, and
  • it's almost accessible to users without JavaScript. "Almost" because it unhides the div that tells non-JavaScript users what to do... via JavaScript. Maybe this will be fixed in 3.0?

No longer supported:

  • <meta> tags were removed; now how will search engines circa 1996 know how to index the content?

We'll keep you updated as new features and enhancements are added.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, Marlboro.com is running ASP.NET on IIS, as evidenced by these two different 404 errors.