[Quoted from a different thread:]
Victor, thanks again for dropping by, your participation here is much appreciated.

I apologize in advance if this comes across sounding sarcastic, but in response to question two: does your department have its own list of shortcomings and/or design goals, or should I start from scratch? I'm kind of thinking that maybe WN employees, perhaps because they don't have to use travel web sites very much, really don't have much experience with state-of-the-art features used on other sites. If you do have a list it would save me countless hours of work to start there; heck, perhaps you have everything I need already in the works. I presume you can't post such a list publicly, but I'd happily sign a non-disclosure agreement to be able to see it privately and thus be better able to discuss these matters with you.

Also, out of curiosity, I'm wondering about several things related to the development of southwest.com. I realize you might not be at liberty to answer them all, at least publicly, but here goes:

• What year was the southwest.com web interface to the booking engine deployed?
• Was it an internal project or was it developed by an outside contractor?
• If internal, how many, if any, of the original developers still with the company?
• Is the online team separate from the team working on the back-end systems? If they are the same group I can see that it would be difficult to take them away from the back-end work to spend time on the other parts of the system.

Finally, in terms of the feedback you seek, how much detail and technical specificity would you like? Should I go to the level of pointing out that "visibility" is misspelled as "visiblity" on line 599 of the reservations default style sheet? (I did not make that up as a hypothetical, it really is misspelled.) As Victor no doubt realizes, user agents ("browsers" to the lay person) are required to ignore the invalid declaration. I have not attempted to trace the affected class and where it might be used to determine whether this error ever comes into play.

To tie this in to Brian's original post, I need to explain that I assume the overall system consists of three relatively distinct major components:

1. The HTML forms and pages with which the web site visitor interacts;
2. The southwest.com web server(s), in particular the CGI programs installed thereon; and
3. The back end systems, presumably consisting of the 1991 vintage mainframe applications.

If I am mistaken about the above, please clarify for us.

I realize that upgrading the back end is an enormous undertaking. (I wonder, though, why y'all can't just pay the garage-o-mizer dude to stay home for a week or two and knock out the whole project for you! ) All kidding aside, I maintain that significant enhancements to the user experience could be made with changes to system components one and two in the list above. Many of these enhancements would be easily implemented, some would take a bit more effort. I also believe that relatively few of the things I have in mind would require waiting for the major overhaul of the back-end system. (In fact I have recently been successful building a few experimental workarounds for some of the impediments that cause my own interactions with southwest.com to be so inefficient—despite the fact that as of the morning of 14-July I knew virtually nothing about writing DHTML; I could not have even written the "Hello World" script in JS without Googling for it.)

As an aside to the above, has anyone on the online team looked at the comments and suggestions in several previous threads on this topic, such as the one titled ""A much needed web site enhancement, please" or "Wish list: flight status for previous day" (the thread started by nsx that finally induced me to join FT!) I know Brian mentioned bringing up some of those suggestions, but, for example, last time I made a southwest.com purchase my credit card information was still being saved in my forms completion file, and that is not a good thing from a security perspective.