The new Gap.com: A peak under the hood

Well, I haven't even had a chance to work much on my template and I've already got something to post about!

I went to the Gap.com and got this message saying that I was one of the few who was being allowed to see their new site. Apparently it's been down for a little while now undergoing renovations. Unfortunately I don't have a screen cap of the message (it won't come up any more for me). If you're interested in seeing the site for yourself, just keep trying, it seems to let you in if you're persistent. In fact it seems to have gotten easier to get into since the first time I got in.

Anyhow, after spending a little time skimming over the site and peeking under the hood, I have to give the team who worked on it a definite "A" for effort. For starters, it's built using Web Standards. It doesn't validate, but it's mainly due to unescaped ampersands and a couple of tags that are in the wrong place. Plus I noticed a meta tag that wasn't closed. But I guess it's probably because they've got a fairly large team working on it and not everyone is on the same wavelength.


One of the first things you notice when you navigate the site is the mouse-over button that appears over the products that allows you to view its details. I think that the product information is delivered through an AJAX-esque setup since there are three IFrames that follow you throughout the site who are contained in a div aptly named "dataLoaderIFrames".

Unfortunately, even though they made an effort at using Web Standards, they didn't implement Unobtrusive JavaScript as you can't view the site without JavaScript enabled.


All in all, even though there's room for improvement (we can all nitpick) I'd say that the site is nicely done. Good going guys!