Enough is Enough - Why is the Canberra Liberals' site perpetually broken?

Verily, mine eyes are humming even now!

Feel the power of the RiotACT…

Dear Riot Act

Thank you for bringing to our attention the problems you have experienced with the drop-down menu system on our website when using browsers other than Internet Explorer.

We have acted to rectify this problem and are pleased to advise that our web-designers have updated accordingly to work with all major browsers.

Please let me know if you experience any further difficulties.

I hope you enjoy the full functionality of the site.

Andrew Wilsmore
ACT Director
Liberal Party of Australia

Their JavaScript code is correct for about, oh, 1999.

Tt appears that the dropdown menus will work with Netscape *4*, but not a more modern browser.

And the Liberal site falls into an interesting gap: Firefox/Mozilla will work with IE-specific code as long as the website doesn’t test whether it will work *first*. Since it tests for IE-compatibility (but then doesn’t provide code to make Firefox work), the menus are silently dropped without an error.

I get similar problems when working on my own sites… apparently standards aint standards.

Or just make then standards compliant?

I wouldn’t mind (as much) if they were consistently broken.

Actually that would also explain the apparent timing of their site stopping working for me too…

Would you look at that: in explorer on a windows machine you get fancy menus popping down from all those links.

Why couldn’t they just make them links as well as fancy menu doovys?

Actually I use safari by default.

but i tried things in IE recently to little improvement.

So the liberals are the party of monopolistic degredation of open protocols these days? Interesting.

I would hazzard a guess that you are not running a John Howard compliant web browser… I can get the site to work in IE but not in Firefox…

I suggest you get yourself a Liberal standards compliant browser (mind you your not missing much on their page anyway)