Any particular reason why Subway was chosen? There's got to be a billion other pages out there as bad or <i>worse</i>.<p>Personally, I like Sears.com. I looked more closely after I found and reported a security hole in one of their systems. It's <i>far</i> more terrifying than the relatively-tame code I saw on Subway's site.
Obviously a little late to read this.. but the source now shows this:<p>Now the that big switch is gone, here are some fun facts:
1. This site was created in 2002, using Visual Studio 2003.
2. Yes there was some editing done in frontpage. The editors worked better than VS 2003, and we had a license for it.
3. A lot from the funky mark-up is from some early generation .NET thirdparty controls we've been maintaining.
4. We look forward to updating the site as much as you (probably more in fact!)
Thanks for the QA, Redditors!
<a href="http://shop.subway.com/substore/substore/tabid/38/entityname/category/categoryid/1/sename/feature-products/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://shop.subway.com/substore/substore/tabid/38/entityname...</a><p>I guess when your url looks like that, it's not that much of a surprise to have that much view state.<p>(edit: Just noticed it looks like that is DNN)
The reason Subway doesn't invest much in its website is because its primarily a franchise sales tool. The consumer doesn't really factor in here much at the corporate level.<p>I did a bunch of bids for some other very large franchise company websites and they were almost universally reluctant to invest any amount of money in upgrading their website. To the corporate honchos they make their $$ selling franchises - they could care less about consumer utility. They aren't selling many sandwiches via the web so everything else on the website is just a grudging formality - menu, store locator, coupons etc<p>(That said, this site is a marvel of modern engineering. I especially like how line 2 dives right into a table tag. Screw <html> or <head>, give me MORE TABLES!!)
ONMOUSEOVER loves you! It just wants to be your friend!<p>Also, I just noticed that buried deep within the body section is some juicy metadata about a Fiery Footlong Frenzy. I need to start slipping that into all the code I write. Maybe buried somewhere deep within a table. With some <strike> tags in between for good measure.
From a user's perspective, the site loads quick and displays fine. Would there be any particular reason that would motivate the programmers of Subway.com to clean up their code or reformat it in a more efficient way?