If you click that, it will just loop back to the search form (unless you’ve been there before, because it appears to save your last restaurant as a cookie or session value).
The thing is, I know to check this. I know to look in the URL and make sure it’s valid on its own. But how many other people do? I wonder how many people every single day email that URL to someone and get a response like, “That URL you sent didn’t work for me…”
Why, oh why, do people do this? Oh yeah, because ASP.Net encourages you to do it.
(Sad thing is, making this particular situation GET-friendly wouldn’t have been much more difficult. It appears to be a cross-page postback anyway, so how hard would it have been to have just put the menu ID in the querystring and make the link an actual hyperlink? It’s not like it’s posting back to itself.)
Yes, I know, other languages encourage you to do stupid things too, however they’re usually confined to server-side and code-centric stupidity which doesn’t affect the user so much. The difference here is that ASP.Net infiltrates the client way too damn much, and stuff like this results.