Sliding Doors of Laziness
Hey Verizon, cool tabs. Though brown isn’t really in your corporate palette, is it? And those tabs look strangely familiar… like, a tutorial I followed more than seven years ago familiar.
Sure enough those tabs are from Douglas Bowman’s famous Sliding Doors of CSS article for A List Apart. Here’s the example page. Copy. Paste. Done. I’m surprised Verizon had the decency to resist hot-linking the image files on A List Apart’s very own servers. Because the files are exactly the same, from filenames to pixels to dimensions to file size.
Here’s right.gif at A List Apart and right.gif at Verizon. And left.gif at A List Apart and left.gif at Verizon.
To be fair, there’s nothing unethical at work here. It’s just a tutorial. Douglas’ work is meant to be copied, pasted, tweaked, dissected, shared, massaged, manipulated, learned from. It’s simply disappointing to see that the largest wireless company in the United States is stealing images and pasting example code without putting an ounce of thought into its own design.
