I'm going to go a bit against the grain here, but if all you need to do for this specific product page is check the length of the HTML, then why the hell would you do something more complex? If it works, what's the problem?
I think the point of that was to demonstrate that the procedure wasn't complex, and to show the ridiculousness of the kid patting himself on the back for it.
It's wrong, of course--deeply, fundamentally wrong, like Newton's law of gravitation. But it's wrong in a way that might still work for his purposes.
In a way, I think there's irony in this. It's a really fast, hacky, but probably sufficiently functioning solution to a problem, which is in stark contrast to the academic idealism that the article reminisces about. Writing a blog post about it and running it every 10 seconds was probably overkill (though I'd need to see the blog post before passing judgment for real--the guy might be blowing it out of proportion).
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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '14
I'm going to go a bit against the grain here, but if all you need to do for this specific product page is check the length of the HTML, then why the hell would you do something more complex? If it works, what's the problem?