163659 - bankpoalim.co.il - [meta] Evangelizing Bank HaPoalim Online (Hebrew)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: Hebrew, defect)

Description

[Ilya Konstantinov]

There are numerous issues to evangelize. Those issues can only be seen by owners
of Bank HaPoalim accounts who have signed up to enable Internet access to their
bank account, so the range of people who can participate in QA is limited.

The issues (after logging in):
==============================
1. The main frame is rendered correctly (ISO-8859-8 Visual), although has an
incorrect META tag specification:
<meta CONTENT="text/html" ; charset="iso-8859-8" HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type"></meta>
instead of:
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-8">

2. In "Pirut yetrot be-pikdonot shikliim", the "Hatzeg" link doesn't work. It
seems to use obsolete document.layers API.

3. The menu frames have no charset specifications.

4. The menu frames seem to be delivered in UTF-8, but the Hebrew is text is laid
out visually. This is invalid (Unicode is always Logical). For some reason,
setting "View > Character Coding > Hebrew Visual (ISO-8859-8)" seems to "fix"
the Hebrew direction (until the next time we enter the site).

Evangelizing ground
===================
The bank is aware of Netscape and Mozilla but refuses to support clients who
mention the word "Linux" (since Linux is not a supported OS; they hardly found
MacOS worthy of support). The site claims to support Netscape 6.2 (and Mozilla,
according to tech suppport person), but apparently it doesn't.

Also, Netscape support isn't on the top of their priorities, as they claim 95%
of the users use Windows / IE 5.

Status
======
The technical support department is not helpful, as their assumption is that
something is wrong on your side.
As of now, it is impossible to contact the technical department directly, so I'm
trying to pass them a mail through a customer support person.

Comment 1

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Mac users have the same problems as well.
We have already a few bugs open about that bank. Anyone have a direct contact there?

Comment 2

[Shoshannah Forbes]

Accepting- I think it will be a good idea to ue this bug as a tracking bug.

Comment 3

[Ilya Konstantinov]

Points 3 and 4 are invalid as evangelism issues. Both are a result of a bug in
Mozilla (see bug 165609). I will look for a workaround for the site.

Anyway, a refresh of the page (click in the URL bar and press Enter, or click
Reload) makes the problem go away.

Comment 4

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Ilya, you now have permissions to confirm and resolve bugzilla bugs.

Comment 5

[leor]

Attachment: Screenshot of Bank HaPoalim site at login

Comment 6

[leor]

Attachment: Site after selecting "Hebrew Visual" from View -> Character Coding

Comment 7

[leor]

As of version 1.2, the Bank HaPoalim site doesn't display correctly even after
selecting "Hebrew Visual" from View -> Character Coding. In all the versions up
to 1.2b (including that version), selecting "Hebrew Visual" would temporarily
"fix" the problem as previously described. However, from version 1.2 and later
even that no longer works (as can be seen in the screenshots provided). I'm not
really into HTML so I can't say exactly what's going on, only that it used to
work and now it doesn't. I'm currently using version 1.3a (Build ID 2002121216)
on Mac OS X 10.2.2

Comment 8

[Ilya Konstantinov]

Another problem: When using the Password restoration page, the fields won't accept Hebrew 
text unless your Default Character Coding is set to ISO-8859-1 (yes, 1 and not 8). If it's set to 
anything else (e.g. ISO-8859-8, Windows-1255), the Hebrew text would turn into question 
marks. Setting the "Default Character Coding" is a common task for those who wish to 
correctly view pages which lack charset specification (assuming most pages I visit are Hebrew, 
I'd want to set the default to Windows-1255 instead of ISO-8859-1). 
 
The problem lies in BankHapoalim's treatment of the Accept-Charset header which is sent 
along with the submitted form, containing the user's "preferred" charset (ie. the Default 
Character Coding). The site is not supposed to do any processing on it when resolving the form 
values (which are, BTW, submitted correctly: I checked with livehttpheaders) -- but Bank 
Hapoalim's site does. 
 
It should be noted that BankHapoalim's support people are quite arrogant and unfriendly 
towards their customers ("But it doesn't matter. We don't support Linux. The bank will make its 
decision on what platforms to support based on financial considerations."). However, they do 
claim to support MacOS and Windows and since this problem appears on all platforms, they 
ought to fix it. It'd be nice if anyone else would care to bug them about it. 

Comment 9

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg

Comment 10

[Tsahi Asher]

the site serves visual hebrew to IE too.

Comment 11

[Ilya Konstantinov]

With bug 165609 solved, we should have no more "reload to reverse menus" 
weirdness. However, now the menus would always be reversed, since now we behave 
exactly like IE (which is The Right Thing to do), while BankHaPoalim JS 
reverses menu texts before writing them *only* for IE. So this turns into an 
evangelism issue. 
 
Also, a new bug 246700 for an existing issue: the side frames being displayed 
in "Gibberish" characters sometimes. It's due to a Mozilla bug as well. The 
cause is known so I expect it to be swiftly resolved. 
 
Back to evangelising, who of you is whilling to speak to the bank as an 
"Israeli representative of Mozilla"? I think that, coming as an organization 
seeking for cooperation, there's a much bigger chance for this to work. 

Comment 12

[Ilya Konstantinov]

Now that bug 246700 is fixed, Bank HaPoalim's menus would *ALWAYS* display 
reversed on Mozilla, unless Bank HaPoalim fixes their site. 
 
To fix it, they'll need to edit this JS: 
https://www.bankpoalim.co.il/new_images/SCRIPTS/nb_MainFrameSetMenu.js?M=Mver121 
 
and replace all 'if(browserName.indexOf("Microsoft") == -1)' checks, which 
choose whether to print Visual Hebrew or Logical Hebrew, with a check for 
Netscape 4 only: (Mozilla behaves more like Internet Explorer does) 
 
if ((browserName.indexOf("Netscape") != -1) && (browserVer < 5)) 
	// use visual text 
else 
	// use logical text 
 
Again, who will take the evangelising communications? 

Comment 13

[Ilya Konstantinov]

From a conversation with BankHapoalim's support today (both the initial person
and the supervisor), they refuse to support Mozilla (even on Macintosh) except
for what they define as "trivial problems". Modifying their site is, of course,
not a trivial request.

The supervisor told me he'll forward the request in his monthly "improvement
proposals" (הצעות יעול) report.

If that's any consolation, when I said "Mozilla", they could say they don't
support Mozilla nor Netscape nor Firefox, so this means I'm not alone with the
complaints.

Comment 14

[Felix Miata]

Conforming summary to TFM item 10 at 
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/procedures.html#file-new

Comment 15

[Tsahi Asher]

current status:
seamonkey 1.0.6 (Gecko/20061030):
uses visual hebrew, generally looks ok.

firefox 1.5.0.8 (Gecko/20061025): same as above

firefox 2.0.0.1pre (Gecko/20061127):
text in top and right menues is displayed in reversed order. uses western (iso-8859-1) encoding. reload doesn't change anything. trying to change the encoding manually results in html code displayed where the top and right menues were. the only way i found to fix this is to reload the page. the main frame is displyed correctly.

i think we have a serious issue here, considering the market share of this bank. anyone knows what happened between 1.5 and 2.0 in firefox?

for reference, see attachment 199620 [details] from bug 312363, which includes a log of a session in the account.

Comment 16

[Ilya Konstantinov]

Tsahi, after bug 165609 was solved (before 1.5), I thought 1.5 would bring an era when menus would always be reversed and then maybe the bank would fix them once and for all (they simply run an unnecessary 'reverse' function when the user-agent matched "navigator"). However, in 1.5 it was still possible to work around the reversed menu by reloading the page -- I don't know why, since I thought bug 165609 took care of this inconsistency.

In any case, now the inconsistency is done and we work like a sane browser. Now, it's just the site specifically mistreating "navigator".

Comment 17

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Ilya or Tsahi, what's the latest on this bug? Is it still a problem with Firefox 2? With Firefox 3? With Minefield (Firefox trunk nightly)? With Camino?

Comment 18

[Tsahi Asher]

the bank recently updated their site. if you enter an incorrect password, you are redirected to this page: https://login.bankhapoalim.co.il/cgi-bin/poalwwwc which has this thing at it's <head> section:

<Y><META CONTENT="text/html" HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" charset="windows-1255"></META></Y>

that's a new breed of html, i guess. one thing that sometimes confuses html rookies is that the charset is the value of the content property, like so:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1255">

the result is that if your default encoding is not windows-1255, you will see gibberish.

i'll try to login tomorrow and see how it works.

Comment 19

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to comment #18)
> the bank recently updated their site. if you enter an incorrect password, you
> are redirected to this page: https://login.bankhapoalim.co.il/cgi-bin/poalwwwc

[snip]

> the result is that if your default encoding is not windows-1255, you will see
> gibberish.

Well, all Hebrew lettering looks like "gibberish" to me since I don't speak or read Hebrew ;) but I get what looks very much like a proper page layout there with UTF-8 or "autodetect" set as my default text encoding in Camino trunk and in Firefox 2 with "Universal" auto-detect set.

I suspect, though I don't know for sure, that the lack of a DOCTYPE is forcing us into quirks mode, which is probably helping out with the charset issues.

Other than the encoding thing -- which definitely sounds like a new bug, because this bug has been primarily focused on the bad browser-sniffing, at least as far as I can tell -- does the site work OK? What browser did you do your testing with?

Comment 20

[Tsahi Asher]

using seamonkey 1.1.7, the account area looks ok, except for a few minor hickups, e.g. in the withdrawal account ("over vashav") area, there's a thing called Produce  a GOLD Number, which i don't know what it is, but in english its NABI in the navigation sidebar, and IBAN in the section title.

the biggest problem i found, both in SM and Firefox 2.0.0.14, is the bank messages area (doal vecelular > doar nichnas). here, the first part of the title is reversed: תורגדהו עדימ > דואר נכנס instead of מידע והגדרות > דואר נכנס, and the message list is indented to 2/3rds of the screen, so you have to scroll left to see it properly.

Comment 21

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Those problems don't seem major enough to keep this bug open, so I'm going to resolve this FIXED.

An e-mail to the bank might be helpful in convincing them to fix those last remaining issues.