255386 - microrent.co.uk - Bad browser sniffing and JS causing messed up homepage

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[Greg Mitchell]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803

Microrent PLC is a company that offers Apple Macintosh computers for rent Their
website homepage is a totally garbled mess when accessed in any current Mozilla
based browser. Having looked at the page source, it appears that bad browser
sniffing and non-standard JavaScript is the root of the problem. The site
detects any Mozilla browser as Netscape 4.x, and uses the following heap
of non-standard (AFAIK NS4.x specific) JavaScript, hence the mess.


<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!--
	function init(){
        if (navigator.appName == "Netscape") {
				layerStyleRef="layer.";
				layerRef="document.layers";
				styleSwitch="";
        }else{
				layerStyleRef="layer.style.";
				layerRef="document.all";
				styleSwitch=".style";
		}
	}

	function showLayer(layerName){
		eval(layerRef+'["'+layerName+'"]'+styleSwitch+'.visibility="visible"');
	}
	
	function hideLayer(layerName){
		eval(layerRef+'["'+layerName+'"]'+styleSwitch+'.visibility="hidden"');
	}
	
		function displayText(text,fieldName){
		if (navigator.appName == "Netscape") {
			document.layers[fieldName+ "Netscape"].document.write(text);
			document.layers[fieldName+ "Netscape"].document.close();
		}else{
			document.all[fieldName+"Netscape"].innerHTML=text;
		}
	}
	// -->
</SCRIPT>

The site works fine in Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP (with SP2) and IE 5.2.3
on Mac OS X. The same garbled mess also appears in Safari 1.2.3. Since Safari is
built upon the same rendering used in Konqueror, I'm sure it is very likely
that the same shambolic mess also appears in KDE's browser as well.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http:///www.microrent.co.uk/ in any Mozilla based browser.
2. Prepare to be shocked at the shambolic mess you see before you!
3.

Comment 1

[Felix Miata]

Plenty messy in Linux trunk too (overlapping text and worse).

Comment 2

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Looks fixed in both Camino-trunk and Firefox 2.

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

INCOMPLETE due to lack of activity since the end of 2009.

If someone is willing to investigate the issues raised in this bug to determine whether they still exist, *and* work with the site in question to fix any existing issues, please feel free to re-open and assign to yourself.

Sorry for the bugspam; filter on "NO MORE PRE-2010 TE BUGS" to remove.