yjsoon

The NIE Practicum Office website has this nasty piece of incompatible JavaScript that renders the page unusable in any browser but Internet Explorer. Essentially it’s a JS DOM trick that shows and hides blocks of information below sub-headings, but implemented wrongly at the “checking for browser compatibility” level, so all browsers but IE get the wrong scripts to run.

To solve this problem, I wrote fixpracticum.user.js: a Firefox script for use with GreaseMonkey that enables the hidden blocks’ visibility by default. After I wrote that, I was all pleased with myself and was about to write something similar (CSS-based) to fix the problem in Safari, but I noticed that if one just disabled JavaScript when viewing the site, that worked just fine too, i.e. (pun unintentional), the hidden blocks are visible by default.*

Oh well. Whatever works.

• This is because the webpage doesn’t use a separate stylesheet to hide them, instead running some JS code to inject the “visibility:hidden” and “display:none” styles into the code upon loading the webpage. Oddness.

Tags: nie