I'm sure some of us may have joked around about using the file system as a database, well probably not. It turns out that somebody thought this would be a good idea.
Each link takes you to another pre-created page. Each city gets it's own page page. From there you type in the address, as we can see from this bit of code
[code]
citypage=city+"_"+ss+".htm";
redirect(citypage);
[/code]
there is at least one page for each letter in the alphabet. The 'ss' variable is the first letter of the address typed in. Once it figures out what the first letter of the street name is, it redirects to the next page. There must be hundreds of pages making this up. Each time a change is made somebody would have to go in and manually change every page that is effected. I doubt they have created any automated way of doing this.
Just for a bit of variety the menus are all broken, regx is not used to parse the address, and there is validation on the street number but not on the street name. If you put in a character that does not exist for the street name (any character that has no page for it) you are directed to a 404 page.
I also like this.
[code]
if(thisCookie[i].split("=")[0]=="street"){
ss=thisCookie[i].split("=")[1];
ss=ss.charAt(0);
[/code]
They know they can get a character out of a string, but don't know you can just pluck a character out from any old string.
Interestingly enough, this page on the same site actually uses a database, and if you put in information that does not exist you don't get a 404.
I would hate to see what the master that created the voting page would have done for this.
Edit: Am I missing something, why do I have to put html in my post for line breaks? :(