209428 - http://www.msz.gov.pl/ - left hand menu does not work [document.layers and friends]

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: Polish, defect, P1)

Description

[Peter Bartecki]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; PL; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; PL; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses non standard code on their webpage:
http://www.msz.gov.pl/ [document.layers/document.all] preventing real browsers
from displaying the content properly. 

Code contained in:
http://www.msz.gov.pl/js/layers.js
http://www.msz.gov.pl/js/preload.js

Stylesheet is also not loaded properly so fonts and layout (top of the page and
others) are messed up. 
http://www.msz.gov.pl/js/css.js

  I've sent a note but without going into much of details so feel free to
contact them again ;) Email addresses used:
[e-mail]  (MSZ contact)
[e-mail] (webmaster)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.msz.gov.pl/js/layers.js to see why MSZ is not usuable under
any standard compliant browser.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jason Bassford]

*** Bug 209427 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Confirming. Strange, I remember this website working correctly. Probably
webmaster has changed and replaced good scripts with some obsolete ones.

Comment 3

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

The evil one is the http://www.msz.gov.pl/js/layers.js file, which is made of
two previous scripts - its first part is NN4-IE4 only, its second part is
Gecko-aware. Probably the new webmaster just copied&pasted some scripts without
really knowing what he was doing.

This script is a little mess.

A patched, ugly-but-working, version of layers.js follows (can somebody check if
my corrections don't break the site in MSIE? I'm on Linux now, checked Mozilla
and Konqueror only)

Comment 4

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Attachment: layers.js corrected to work in Mozilla

Comment 5

[Jacek Piskozub]

Accepting and confirming. 

Piotr: Do you want to become the default QA for Polish bugs? If so, please send
me an email - Jacek

Comment 6

[Jacek Piskozub]

Now really reassigning to myself.

Comment 7

[Jacek Piskozub]

Now, really accepting

Comment 8

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Correction in css.js should be just replacing:

if (document.all)

with

if (document.getElementById||document.all)

But I don't understand why the Ministry wants to disable stylesheets for users
that have JS turned off (or use Amaya etc.). They should have made just one
stylesheet and use some CSS-tricks (such as "/*/*/") to hide things that NN4
cannot handle from it...

Comment 9

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

My previous layers.js version made Mozilla do lots of useless calculations,
which caused Mozilla to hang for a while.

This was due to the fact that there are many functions in layers.js that aren't
really used (checked in MSIE 6.0)...

I've set up a corrected version at http://www.marcoos.zwm.punkt.pl/bugzilla/msz
- the HTML is the original one with only paths changed to work properly. So if
MSZ uploads our versions of layers.js and css.js, their website will work ok in
all browsers.

Tested:
- Mozilla 1.4 RC 1 (Linux)
- Netscape 7.02 (Linux)
- Netscape 7.02 (Windows)
- Internet Explorer 6 (Windows)
- Konqueror 3.1 (Linux)
- Opera 7.11 (Linux, has some quirks with image positioning, but the menu works)

I didn't touch the Netscape 4 stuff in the script (only changed ns4 to isNS4,
because the browser sniffing was done TWICE!), so this probably should still
work in this ancient browser.

Corrected layers.js (with unused and doubled functions removed) follows. 

(Note: www.marcoos.zwm.punkt.pl/bugzilla/msz will be pulled of from my server
when MSZ corrects their website)

Comment 10

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Attachment: layers.js - corrected version

Comment 11

[Mathieu Pillard [:mat]]

just a small remark about your layers.js :
why do you sniff for gecko instead of just sniffing for the dom functions you
use, i.e. document.getElementById ?
also, you might want to change this :
        document.getElementById(div_name).style.top = y;
        document.getElementById(div_name).style.left = x;
into this:
        document.getElementById(div_name).style.top = y + "px";
        document.getElementById(div_name).style.left = x + "px";

same goes for all the other places where you set dimensions...

Comment 12

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

mat: this was (one of) the browser-sniffing code from the original layers.js.
I just didn't notice that. ;)

I'm gonna correct this, but will check for document.getElementById&&!document.all,
just to make IE use document.all... ;)

Comment 13

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Attachment: layers.js - the final one

Comment 14

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Sent email to [e-mail] and [e-mail] about the fixed scripts.

Comment 15

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

I did some search and found that the layers.js file is linked to many pages
created by Akonet.pl (including www.akonet.pl), but often its functions aren't used.

We should keep an eye on Akonet.pl, and check if there are other websites made
by them, which use obsoleted and non-standard techniques.

Comment 16

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

There is some progress on msz.gov.pl - correct stylesheet is being loaded
and the menu started to work, but it isn't positioned correctly.

(I've got no reply from MSZ nor Akonet, though).

Comment 17

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

This is because the initDPointer() function isn't executed.

The current <body> tag is:

<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" onload="preloadImages();">

adding initDPointer() to the onload parameter makes the menu position correctly:

<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" onload="preloadImages();initDPointer()">

I'm going to e-mail the webmaster once again. :)

Comment 18

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Sent email to [e-mail] and [e-mail] asking to add initDPointer()
to onload parameter.

Comment 19

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

No progress.

Current workaround: after going to www.msz.gov.pl enter this in your location bar:

javascript:initDPointer()

and the website works just fine.

I'm gonna contact the webmasters once again on Monday.

Comment 20

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

No replies from Akonet nor the Ministry's computer department.

Sent yet another e-mail to [e-mail] and [e-mail], asking to add
initDPointer() to onload parameter of the <body> tag.

If this has no effect, I will try to contact Promotion Department, [e-mail].

Comment 21

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

I've got a reply from Mr. Konrad Galczynski <[e-mail]>
saying that they forward all my messages to Akonet. It's interesting, because
all my e-mails sent do [e-mail] already had [e-mail] as
carbon-copy recipient. 

The rest of that e-mail (sent in the HTML format; the source says the mail has
been written as an MS Word document and then converted into HTML) consisted of
some false statements about Mozilla.

Comment 22

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Yet another e-mail send to dsi and [e-mail], cc'ed to [e-mail]
and European Union Department in The Foreign Ministry (with information about
European Parliament's resolution concerning accessibility of public websites,
see
http://europa.eu.int/information_society/topics/citizens/accessibility/web/wai_2002/ep_res_web_wai_2002/index_en.htm
for more information).

Comment 23

[staszyna]

I have sent an e-mail as an ordinary user asking them why the menu doesn't work:)

I have also checked out the workaround you provided, but there are still a few
problems with the site - the pop-out menus appear in various places (I don't
mean the entire page but the wired positioning of the pop-out list within the
menu item) and then, they don't dissapear when the cursor leaves them. But it is
still better than the current state.

Comment 24

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

The strange position of the menu is what they want - compare www.msz.gov.pl with
my workaround in Mozilla and without my workaround in Opera or Internet
Explorer. It's the same.

They *want* the menu to be displayed in this weird way. 

Comment 25

[staszyna]

I wrote "wired" instead of "weird" in my previous comment:) My mistake. Well,
it's not wired:)

I opened the site with Opera, and it is very.. strange indeed, I must say. I
don't like such menus at all, but this one seems particularly nasty to me:) I
don't know why they want it to work this way. Maybe we should provide them with
an appropriate CSS menu, that works only in Mozilla this time:)

In my browser the menu looks even worse, because I have set the minimal font
size to 10 points, so the lines of the menu items sometimes break, which causes
the pop-out lists to appear sometimes higher and sometimes lower... that's a
little bit confusing to me, since quite often the lists look as if they
poped-out from the adjecent menu item. Well, i hope you understand what I mean...

Pity they don't conform to WCAG 1.0 - that would make the site easier to read..
I hate those small fonts. But Bugzilla is the place to discuss that:)

Cheers.

Comment 26

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Yet another e-mail sent. Asking to add initDPointer() to onload. That's all the
site needs now (well, "now" means "since July" ;)) to work in Mozilla. 

This time to [e-mail] only.


To comment 25:

WCAG conformace is a Good Thing[TM], but you probably know how many problems we
have with asking people to add just one word and a pair of brackets to their
site. WCAG will have no power in this country until Poland joins the EU next
year (at least).

Comment 27

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Marking this as ASSIGNED (should have done it long ago).

Comment 28

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

Site has been corrected at last (the script seems to be rewritten).

Resolving FIXED. :))

Comment 29

[Marek Stępień [:marcoos, inactive]]

*** Bug 209427 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***