Today marks the end of our brief tour at WTFU. And what better a way to end it than how it probably should have started: with the university's public webpage. At least, that's the first place that Mike R. looked when he heard that WTFU offered some fairly good and relatively inexpensive graduate programs. Now this may come as a shock to some, but Mike reported that web-browsing experience at wtfuniversity.edu was just a bit less than optimal.

The first thing that Mike noticed was that none of the navigation links worked. When he watched more closely, he saw that clicking on "Graduate Studies" yielded a small JavaScript error. No big deal; as a Firefox user, Mike is used to this. Curious, he decided to have a look at the source: 

<span id="graduateStudiesLink" class="hyperlink"
onclick="clickto(this.id);">Graduate Studies</span>

A bit different, but certainly not terrible. Maybe they didn't like <A> tags. I don't blame them; personally, I can't stand the <STRONG> tag. Look at it ... just sitting there ... all "oooh, look at me, I'm STRONG, I'm the STRONG tag." Pfft .. pretentious little -- err, sorry. Anyway, that still shouldn't cause a JavaScript error, so Mike looked a little closer ... 

function clickto(navId) {
	var url = getUrlFromNavId(navId);
	if (isBrowserIE()) {
		navToUrlForIE(url);
	} else if (isBrowserNetscape()) {
		navToUrlForNetscape(url);
	} else if (isBrowserFirefox()) {
		navToUrlForFirefo(url);
	} else {
		window.location = url;
	}
}

Well that explained it. There was no navToUrlForFirefo() function defined. But that's excusable; who doesn't make the occasional typo that prohibits a fairly large group of users from accessing all navigation on a public website, and then neglects to test it before going live? Undeterred, Mike switched over to Internet Explorer and pressed on.

Even with Internet Explorer, Mike noticed the site was acting a bit strange. Despite surfing on his company's T3 connection, several images and stylesheets were loading very slowly, if at all. Curiosity struck again and Mike did another View Source: 

<img src="/imgSrc?SELECT data FROM pubwww.dbo.imgs WHERE id=51">

...

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
	href="/cssSrc?SELECT data FROM pubwww.dbo.csss WHERE id=18"
	/>

See, that's not too bad. If you think about it, using SQL to retrieve resources like that actually can -- I got nothing. However, I will end today on a good note. After his experience on their webpage, Mike decided that a graduate degree at WTFU just wasn't the right thing for him …

UPDATE: As requested, WTFU Gear is now available at http://www.cafepress.com/thedailywtf

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!