Wherefore Art Thou, QA?

A former ePrizer sent me a link to a current Instant Win promotion for Harrahs. Wow. I'm curious what happened in the short amount of time since I'd been at ePrize when everything on the front end looked tight. In my earlier posting about ePrize reverting to "old school" table-based HTML. At least with that the front end looked okay, even if it wasn't optimal from a back end perspective.

This Harrahs promotion, though, whew! It stinks on ice. Take a look at the homepage.

Not only is there no font face specified in the CSS (desipite tons of span tags that refer to an undefined "textTimes13" class) but there are also these funky line breaks all over the place. Taking my font down from its "natural" setting on Firefox makes the text line up correctly but there are hard-coded <br /> tags all over the place. That's just the first page. Let's not even talk about the placeholder "Back" link on the error page that is referred to as a "Back Button" despite it not being a button. And then there are the monstrosities disguised as pop up windows for the FAQ and Rules pages...

I can only say that neither the Interface Developers (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) nor Quality Assurance caught this and raised a fuss. I remember hearing horror stories of how stringent QA could be and I just don't see the folks of old allowing such slop to get through to the public.