Bug 3792 – odeon.co.uk site unusable in Safari, missing many interactive elements (document.all)

• Component: Evangelism
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[John Sullivan]

This is also in Radar as <rdar://problem/3491458>

The page http://www.odeon.co.uk/Odeon/home.html is supposed to have menus at the top, but they do 
not appear in Safari, so the site can't be used. This is (according to the Radar report) "the most popular 
movie chain in the UK".

We suspect this is caused by browser-specific Javascript, but maybe there's a way WebKit can make the 
site work. The first step is to reduce the problem down to a minimal test case.

[David Storey]

Created attachment 2775 [details]
reduction of menu dropping into view

Odeon is a very big cinema chain in the UK, so this bug is pretty major IMHO. 
I Removed all elements except for one div/image that drops down into view.  I'm
not sure if the sub menus have bugs too, but they can be checked after the main
menu works.

[Dave Hyatt]

Someone should evangelize the site.  They're using document.all instead of document.getElementById.  
That's a WinIE-only extension.  Firefox recently added what they call "undetectable" document.all support, 
and we are thinking about doing that (that would fix the bug), but it's pretty sad to see a major site not 
using getElementById.

[Dave Hyatt]

Turning on document.all by default is extremely problematic, since it would cause sites to think we were 
WinIE in many cases (and to use even more WinIE extensions that we may not yet support).  Firefox's idea 
of undetectable support (say no when queried, say yes when accessed without querying) would fix this 
assuming you didn't reduce out code that checked for document.all.

[Finlay Dobbie]

I evangelised the site many moons ago - in the end, I spoke with the guys who wrote it. Basically everyone 
agrees it sucks, but Odeon management doesn't think there's a problem and refuses to pony up money for 
anyone to fix it.

There was even a big hoo-ha over here because someone else put up a site which screenscraped the 
Odeon for their film times and presented them in an acessible form, and the Odeon sent them a C&D. It 
did force them into putting up an "accessible" text-only site in the end, but it'd still be nice if it worked. :-)

[Finlay Dobbie]

Oh, and unfortunately a quick perusal of the source at http://www.odeon.co.uk/Odeon/js/global.js shows 
that they are checking for document.all

[David Storey]

http://www.pgawest.com/ has the same problem.  it checks for document.all or document.layers.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Apparently, odeon.co.uk has been redesigned, and now it works just fine in both released Safari and ToT. 

http://www.pgawest.com/ still doesn't work (and it needs detectable document.all or document.layers).

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

http://www.pgawest.com/ works fine now, too.