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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

– Live from The Internets since 2003 –

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“Javacode”

19 July 2003

So I was shopping for a new TV. My TV is starting to act up, as well as not always showing NTSC DVDs in colour and having a nasty old fashioned square screen.

Whilst looking around the Currys website I noticed a great big button in the left-hand menu marked “Netscape Users”. I can’t link to the page because of the Broadvision content management system they’re using, but here’s what it says:

This site has been optimized for Netscape 4.5 and Internet Explorer. Users of Mozilla based browsers such as Netscape 6 and above and the Opera browser, will experience compatibility issues while trying to browse our site, this is due to the inconsistencies between Internet Explorer and Netscape’s handling of javacode and certain html tags.

ooo get that … javacode and misbehaving html tags! Let me point out at this point that Currys are part of a retail giant called Dixons Group PLC who also own PC World and Dixons electrical retailers, whose sites appear to be based on the same system and therefore also fail to work in any Mozilla based browser. (Presumably also due to nasty javacode.)

The problem would actually appear to lie with their DHTML menus. Standards compliant, cross browser DHTML menus are not difficult to implement. I bet they’d blame it on the CMS as well as the browsers if you pushed them. I bet it doesn’t work in Safari either.

It’s not like these guys have no money to invest in their online stores. In fact, it’s not like it would even cost any more to get their sites right if they’d bothered to think about it from the outset. From the mere fact that they are capable of putting such an idiotic statement on their website is a fair indicator that whoever was responsible for this project on behalf of the Dixons Group was insufficiently qualified, and whichever development company was hired to produce this string of monstrosities was, at best, badly chosen.

It is immensely frustrating to see this sort of thing amongst big companies who really should know better, and certainly have enough clout to demand more. If the agency you’re using can’t deliver a site that will allow its visitors to use the site to its full, then umm .. change your agency. If your content management system prevents you from achieving this goal, then what the hell is it actually achieving for you? Get the vendors to fix it. Demand that the vendors fix it. If they can’t fix it, return the damn thing and change your vendor.

First and foremost, however, be sufficiently educated to know when you’re being taken for a ride. Make it your business to know that there ain’t no such thing as javacode, because if that isn’t your business, what is?

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Mike: The problem with an industry that becomes ’cool’ or ’attractive’ to be in it attracts the gold diggers (a.k.a. the monkeys). They crowd the market making it hard for HR departments to find and hire good people. This goes all the way up to management with a lack of skilled, knowledgeable at board level and they make wide ranging decisions that tie the hands of those on the coal face. This is especially true when they commision systems by companies like Broadvision or Vignette who’s products you pay so much for (and then more for customisation and support) when you could commission a tailored system for much less. I was to be involved in a small development of a support/work request system for a small department in a very large bank. I had in mind to recommend and install RT from Best Practical which is a free open source solution. This is obviously a low cost solution and typically the bank has now decided what they actually need is to bubble the requirements up through the company and get a complete workflow management system from Vingette or someone similar which will cost millions, take months (even years) and be vastly over enginered.

    Its things like this that drive me nuts... no wonder the economy is shot with idiots running the major concerns!
  2. § George: The Dixons/PC World site doesnt seem to work with anything except IE, try going to the site with Safari, you encounter the same problems.
  3. § C: As George reports, when a Safari user mouses over the menu on the left, it evokes a Javascript alert. A thought: after reading (I believe on Zeldman’s site) that BuyMusic.com (an offshoot of Buy.com) is not cross-browser accessible, I took the opportunity to write to Buy.com, via their contact form, that I found that insulting and therefore would not be making any further purchases from them. Probably a worthless act, but it vented my spleen a bit.
  4. § Drew: Your gesture was probably of more value than you’d think, C. For every complaint Buy.com receive, they can see in a tangible way where they have lost business. The more times they lose business through poor web development, the easier it becomes for them to justify investing in good developers.
  5. § madhav: java code
  6. § shwetha: java code pertaining Jframes and Odbc connectivity
  7. § yugi: even though we have a service() method in Servlet interface why do we go for a doGet() or a doPost() method

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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