210482 - garda.ie - Navigation section does not work correctly

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[Gary Coady]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030612
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030612

In the page at http://www.garda.ie/angarda/home.html (and other pages), the dark
blue navigation section should show different light blue boxes to its right, to
present links to different parts of the site.

These do not work for two reasons: firstly, they only support NS4 layers or IE's
document.all. Secondly, if they add document.getElementById calls, they still
have to add IDs to all divs which they want to show/hide.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Select any link in the dark blue box at the top of the page.
The light blue box should change depending on which link is selected.
Actual Results:  
The light blue box does not change.

Comment 1

[Gary Coady]

Sent an email to the webmaster on 15 June. No response yet. Contents of the mail
were:

Hi there,
I am contacting you to inform you that the garda.ie site cannot be viewed
correctly in any browser which uses the W3C standards for describing HTML
documents, rather than techniques that only work in one browser. These browsers
include Netscape 6, Netscape 7, Mozilla, Opera, Safari and Firebird.

This complaint (and description of suggested fixes) arises because I use neither
Netscape 4 nor Internet Explorer as my web browser.

Description of the appearance of the problem:
The links in a dark blue box ("Organisation", "Sections", "Community",
"Publications", "Traffic", "News", "Local Pages", "Careers", "Contact Us") do
not change what is seen in the light blue box to the right. Many sections of the
site can therefore only be reached through the "Site Map" button.


There are two main issues with the HTML/JavaScript on the Garda Síochana site,
when used by standards-conforming web browsers.

1.
Specific parts of the document are referenced by using layers for Netscape 4,
and the document.all collection for Internet Explorer.

The affected browsers use the standard document.getElementById() which is
described here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113/core.html#ID-getElBId

I have attached a slightly modified dynam.js file which has the calls to
document.getElementById() added, for browsers which support this.


2.
document.getElementById() selects HTML elements by using their ID. This has to
be defined as an attribute of each element you wish to modify.

I have attached a modified home.html file, which contains the changes to allow
this to work. Basically, wherever "name=blah" appears, I change it to "name=blah
id=blah".

This editorial change will have to be made to all HTML documents for the top
menu to operate correctly.


Please let me know if you have any questions. Also, let me know if you cannot
fix the site as above, due to the use of HTML creation tools. Depending on the
tools, there may be a workaround.

Thanks,
Gary.

Comment 2

[Gary Coady]

Attachment: Fixed Javascript version

This dynam.js version was sent to the webmaster on 15 June. Main changes were
to add calls to document.getElementById for browsers which support that.

Comment 3

[Gary Coady]

Attachment: Fixed version of /angarda/home.html

Added ID parameters wherever there was already a NAME parameter.

This needs to be done for all other pages on the website.

Comment 4

[Thomas]

In the page at http://www.garda.ie/angarda/home.html (and other pages), the dark
blue navigation section should show different light blue boxes to its right, to
present links to different parts of the site.
---> for me this works! (with Mozilla 1.8a4)
Maybe because Mozilla now supports document.all? (as I thought I have read)

Comment 5

[Gary Coady]

(In reply to comment #4)
> In the page at http://www.garda.ie/angarda/home.html (and other pages), the dark
> blue navigation section should show different light blue boxes to its right, to
> present links to different parts of the site.
> ---> for me this works! (with Mozilla 1.8a4)
> Maybe because Mozilla now supports document.all? (as I thought I have read)

I've checked this out (with the Javascript debugger)... the site MIGHT have
worked if it didn't have the most horrible browser sniffing code in existence.
It detects Netscape based on layers support, and IE based on document.all
support. Neither test succeeds in Mozilla, so none of the if/then code gets
executed.

You were probably seeing the site properly because of bug #259935. Site still
doesn't work, with trunk build 2004111322.

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Has anyone made any progress at all toward getting them to fix this? It appears to be broken some four years later.

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Forgot to update the URL and confirm the bug when I was triaging this last week. Lots of document.all and document.layers in 

http://www.garda.ie/dynam.js

still.

Comment 8

[Gary Coady]

garda.ie is now completely redesigned and reworked.

Shocked! Fixed at last, six years later. I could almost cry :-)