Why does Amazon.com have  at the end of their landing page?

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+21 Q:

Why does Amazon.com have  at the end of their landing page?

Why does Amazon.com have  at the end of their landing page? I have heard that it is just some text that some sort of script or component looks for to tell if the entire page was rendered.

Does anyone know if this is true, and if so, is it a good (or common) website monitoring practice?

It could possibly be used as a marker for whatever reason, reporting, search and replace etc... whatever...

It could also just be a joke, I remember Amazon having the hidden pixel thing in the footer with a link to a secret page. Kind of like an easter egg.

There is definitely no technical reason for this...

zinc 2010-02-09 19:39:13

+3 A:

Many developers do funny things in there source for no reason other than for people to find it. www.digg.com has ascii art at the top of its source today (don't know how long it will be there) they also have at the bottem of their page  That's the atomic mass of (D)euterium, the (I)nverse Fine Structure Constant, and then the gravitational constant (G) twice

Scott Chamberlain 2010-02-09 19:40:31

Yes, I have written my share of harmless easter eggs and comment jokes. I'm wondering if this is a verified joke in the Amazon-MEOW case.

Chris Dwyer 2010-02-09 19:43:29

The ascii art is a viral ad for some new EA game.

bdl 2010-02-09 19:46:38

+3 A:

Given that unless scripts are included in-line they will have to be requested from the server with a separate HTTP request which in itself could fail (i.e. the home page could load successfully and the checking script fail) I don't see how this helps at all.

Slashdot send you a futurama quote with every HTTP request too. (curl -I http://slashdot.org). Much better easter egg than Meow, if you ask me.

Ninefingers 2010-02-09 19:42:45

That's a good point. However, by "rendered" I mean the state at which the HTML is rendered from whatever script/executable/etc is generating it.So, my thought was that maybe there is something on the server side that checks before the HTML is sent to the browser. But, even as I write that, I can't think of why it couldn't be done another way.

Chris Dwyer 2010-02-09 19:48:44

+1 For the Futurama quote. :-)

T.J. Crowder 2010-02-09 19:49:50

I found out about it on a blog somewhere... can't remember where otherwise I'd quote the original author. Still, I've been curl -I'ing other websites since, just in case....

Ninefingers 2010-02-09 19:55:26

@Chris Hmmm I didn't think about server-side checking but I'd expect if there were errors there to be 500 errors on the server side or logs of the server side stuff or some other clue. That's what I look for anyway!

Ninefingers 2010-02-09 19:59:43

I put a really obscure easter egg in the background of my site (doheth.co.uk) - basically it's a reference to this Bender line: "Ones and Zeros everywhere! And I think I saw a 'Two'".

DisgruntledGoat 2010-02-10 16:19:24

+3 A:

I'd say it's very unlikely to be used for determining that the entire page has finished being parsed or anything like that. There are better ways to do it, and I'd be concerned about the reliability of SGML comments being available on the DOM tree, especially ones outside the HTML.

So I'm thinking: Bored humor is the most likely explanation.

T.J. Crowder 2010-02-09 19:49:25

My thought exactly... there are better ways.

Chris Dwyer 2010-02-09 19:52:01

ansaurus

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Why does Amazon.com have  at the end of their landing page?

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