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Client XNone of this ever happened. Any resemblance to any company or person, living or dead is purely and entirely coincidental. I swear, or my name isn't Chris Webber. A long time ago, at least last year, in a land far, far away from Siberia lived a humble engineer working for a humble on-line advertising agency. It was a nice little agency that had a lot of very hard-working people. Unfortunately for them, they were trying to make a living during one of the worst recessions in modern times. It was this that let their clients treat them like dirt. That and they didn't always stand up to their clients. Since the economy was so weak, they didn't have enough confidence to stand up to the client most of the time. Everyone at the company was getting tired. Tired of being pushed around. They knew they worked hard and gave every client very good work. Often times giving the client a lot more than they paid for. Then along came Client X. It started out pretty low key. Only four simple units to produce all based on a previously designed template. We were told all we would have to do was change small parts of the template. That's all we had to do. It didn't sound that bad. The business guys thought we might even break even on the job. Then reality sunk its cold fangs into our engineer[base ']s neck and started to suck his will to live. Not to worry everyone said. It's only four units. How bad could it be? This is how bad... Our person on the other side had problems differentiating between comps and built out versions. "Why do they look different," she would ask. This went on for some time on our first unit. We did nine versions of the first unit. But wait, you ask...this was supposed to be simple changes in a template. Yes. Yes it was. Right off the bat the job was something we didn't sign on for. Our company had already spent more time on the first unit then we expected to on all four. Things weren't looking good. Then it got worse. It turns out that a part of the unit didn't work when a person viewed it though a Hotmail web account. Since it was based on a template that we only changed the artwork in, we knew it wasn't something we did. We thought it might be in the delivery technique. We look into it. We don't have to look too hard to discover that it isn't the delivery technique, but rather Hotmail itself. Yes. Once again, the $34 billion gorilla rears its head and lets out a mighty roar, instructing all to bow before it and conform to it's ways. It works like this; Hotmail wants people to stay in Hotmail. When you are viewing a message in the Hotmail web interface, URLs are re-written to pop-up in a new window with a frame at the top telling you that you might be leaving Hotmail, but they were nice enough to put the content of the URL in the bottom frame. Hotmail doesn't just do this to URLs, but to form action URLs as well. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, except that it doesn't preserve the method of the form. So, if you are trying to POST data, it will be re-written as a GET. Again, normally this would be a problem since most people write their CGI programs to take data from POST and GET. But if you write your CGI to not grab data sent via GET, your stuff will not work when viewed in the Hotmail web interface. But how could Hotmail get away with this? Easy. They don't care. They don't have to care. They probably didn't even do it on purpose. They could have easily made it work and preserve the method of the form. But they didn't, and they don't have to change anything because they are Hotmail. Once we were sure of our findings, we went to Client X and explained that they would have to change their CGI. This didn't go over well with Client X. They had come to us for a simple batch of four units with a template all ready to go. How could anything need to be changed on their end? It always worked before...or so they claimed. Although, anyone looking at the evidence would see that it couldn't have worked because of the way that Hotmail re-writes the URLs and that the data clearly isn't getting to the CGI on Client X's server correctly. Client X gets very unhappy and calls our hard working advertising gnomes arrogant and act very disappointed in our little company. The hard working people wonder if it is really worth it. But then they remember, they have nowhere else to go. The End Thanks to my editor Kim
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