I was about to send a postcard to a friend in another country, so I went to visit the national post company's (TNT Post, Netherlands) web site to check on tariffs. When I got to the correct page I was presented with a drop-down box in which I had to select the type of mail I wanted to send (letters, packets, abroad, etc) and then had to press the 'Search' button. I was already confused by the caption, since it was a fairly small list and all it had to do was list some prices, nothing more. There was no search operation involved.

But the surprise came when I pressed search: nothing happened. As a coder, I tried some tricks (pressing the Return key, selecting another option and the one I wanted again and try again) but nothing worked. So in a feat of brilliance I fired op Internet Explorer and copy-pasted the URL. Hey, it works! I tried some Chrome and Opera as well, but didn't work.

I decided to contact the company with the complaint that it didn't work (I was an "upset customer"). The response I got is something like the following:

Dear sir,

Thank you for your reaction. You indicate that you are unable to use the tariff finder without Explorer. I understand it is annoying when you cannot proceed with your search query.

The applications that are part of the sites of TNT Post are specifically developed voor PC's which run Windows with Internet Explorer. For use of these applications the follow requirements apply:
- Computer with internet access: Windows 98 or higher
- Browser: Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher

The operating systems which are not supported are among others Linux and Mac OS (Apple). The browsers which are not supported are among others Mozilla-Firefox, Safari, Netscape and Opera.

I will forward your concerns to a collegue who is responsible for this. We will use your reaction to review if we can improve our services. You will not receive further feedback about this however.

Kind regards,

Customer service

And I thought we lived in 2008.

A sub-WTF is that the e-mail I received as a response did not contain the actual reply. Instead it contained a link to the website of the company where the actualy reply was displayed.

PS. The page is located here: http://tntpost.nl/voorthuis/brieven-en-kaarten/tarieven/ (warning: Dutch).

pbean:

are specifically developed voor PC's

I'm curious as to how the IE specific code looked like. 

 I've taken to tagging IE-only websites as "malware" in delicious...

 TNT you say... I'm not surprised. I once had to develop a client to use an API they have to automatically send mail. Half-way through I realise that a certain field doesn't have any valid values for this country. This wouldn't be so bad except this field determines how the package is sent (overnight, delivery by 12 tomorrow, etc). Without it you can't use the API. So I call them and they tell me that they'll have to create codes for this country. A few months go by, during which the project is put on hold and we work on other stuff. I call again and they tell me that they're on it.

3 years later I'm still waiting.

Zecc:

pbean:

are specifically developed voor PC's

You missed a spot.

I'm curious as to how the IE specific code looked like. 

Me too. It seems pretty difficult to screw that up.

pbean:

Zecc:

pbean:

are specifically developed voor PC's

You missed a spot.

I'm curious as to how the IE specific code looked like. 

Me too. It seems pretty difficult to screw that up.

belgariontheking:

pbean:

Zecc:

pbean:

are specifically developed voor PC's

You missed a spot.

I'm curious as to how the IE specific code looked like. 

Me too. It seems pretty difficult to screw that up.

As you are the OP, can't you go get the code and post it here?

 Since I posted the link, you could as well. :-)

I looked and it seems the code for the button works just fine, but the button itself is somehow screwed up so that it only activates when you click the upper border of the search button.

pbean:

Since I posted the link, you could as well. :-)

belgariontheking:

Oh. Since you had just mentioned the email with the link to your ticket, I thought the link was for your ticket.

Looking at the page, the problem seems not to be the JavaScript, but the weird CSS.

A right-floating relatively-positioned negative-margined element? Wah?

IE only is more common than it should be, but realistically 90%+ of people who don't use IE know how to fire up IE if the site won't work and unfortunately businesses figure that's good enough for the minority of the market to be inconvenienced if it makes it cheaper to build the site...

Edit: Took out my reasoning, it was 100% wrong and dhromed was right :P

It's a CSS / browserquirk issue.

The button is not clickable in anything other than IE because there's a div (the container of the little tariff table) on top of it.

In IE, elements that are 100% transparent are also click-through. In other browsers, not.

fyjham:

the reason it's IE specific is because they put a span inside an anchor tag then made the anchor clickable which just don't work

dhromed:

This is not a problem. Events bubble up by default, so the click on the SPAN will activate the event on its parent, the A.

Yep, I looked and you were right. I decided that one after 5 minutes of little-sleep glancing and probably should've held off posting :P There is some elements that it won't bubble up to, now that I've checked span isn't one of them but I've never really tried a span inside an a so it seemed like the reason. I didn't realise the design was bad enough that a div was overlapping it, there didn't really seem to be anything nearby to justify causing it so I didn't even look ;)

dhromed:

Events bubble up by default

DOA:

3 years later I'm still waiting.

belgariontheking:

dhromed:

Events bubble up by default

I've taken many computers apart, and put almost as many back together correctly, and I've never seen any bubbles.  or bugs.

belgariontheking:

dhromed:

Events bubble up by default

I've taken many computers apart, and put almost as many back together correctly, and I've never seen any bubbles.  or bugs.

(warning: Dutch).

Whew, thanks for the warning. I almost got some of it on me!

halcyon1234:

 

(warning: Dutch).

Whew, thanks for the warning. I almost got some of it on me!

 Nou, dan zorg ik er toch gewoon voor dat je het al binnenkrijgt als je je e-mail leest (of dit draadje bekijkt). Eet mijn giftige taal!

Oo, en veel succes iedereen verder, met de online vertalers enzo. Benieuwd wat die er van maken.

Heb dat trouwens even uitgeprobeerd op de vertaler van google, niet veel soeps... (oftewel in het engels: "not much soup", yeah right)

okay, I'll take a stab at it:

 When you worked in support, you'd often get emails sent to you-- I *think* about their cable (ala television)?  They were illegable and muddled.

Obviously, they were using online translators, though a few of them were done properly. (Or the translations were getting better over time?)

And sometimes you'll even see in print or on websites people who have just used Google translate, which are wrong and they haven't even checked the results, which results in that common phrase becoming "not much soup". (har har).

 Am I close?  Or should I add "purple monkey dishwasher, bork bork bork"?

dtech:

 Nou, dan zorg ik er toch gewoon voor dat je het al binnenkrijgt als je je e-mail leest (of dit draadje bekijkt). Eet mijn giftige taal!

Oo, en veel succes iedereen verder, met de online vertalers enzo. Benieuwd wat die er van maken.

Heb dat trouwens even uitgeprobeerd op de vertaler van google, niet veel soeps... (oftewel in het engels: "not much soup", yeah right)

Hoe komt het toch dat er zoveel Nederlanders hier zitten?

 I'll be nice:

"Well, I'll make sure you get some of that in you if/when you read your email (or watch this thread). Eat my poisonous language!

By the way, good luck everybody, with the online translators and so on. I'm curious what they make of it (=I'm curious how that works out).

I've just tried that on the translator at Google, no good (or in English: "not much soup" (word-by-word translation for a common phrase))"

(intentional rubbish translation, because it was already rubbish in Dutch :P Most of it is word-by-word translated)

 So, to all dutch people: go your gang, use the donkeys' bridge, we can take these people in the mailing.

Forgot something:

"Vell, I'll meke-a soore-a yuoo get sume-a ooff thet in yuoo iff/vhee yuoo reed yuoor imeeel (oor vetch thees threed). Iet my pueesunuoos lungooege-a! By zee vey, guud loock iferybudy, veet zee oonleene-a trunsleturs und su oon. Bork bork bork! I'm cooreeuoos vhet zeey meke-a ooff it (=I'm cooreeuoos hoo thet vurks oooot). I'fe-a joost treeed thet oon zee trunsletur et Guugle-a, nu guud (oor in Ingleesh: "nut mooch suoop" (vurd-by-vurd trunsleshun fur a cummun phrese-a))" (intenshunel roobbeesh trunsleshun, becoose-a it ves elreedy roobbeesh in Dootch :P Must ooff it is vurd-by-vurd trunsleted) Su, tu ell dootch peuple-a: gu yuoor gung, use-a zee dunkeys' breedge-a, ve-a cun teke-a zeese-a peuple-a in zee meeeling.

pbean:

But the surprise came when I pressed search: nothing happened. As a coder, I tried some tricks (pressing the Return key, selecting another option and the one I wanted again and try again) but nothing worked. So in a feat of brilliance I fired op Internet Explorer and copy-pasted the URL. Hey, it works! I tried some Chrome and Opera as well, but didn't work.

 oops.. I never noticed nothing happened. I was happily surprised that packages had got this cheap, so I underpaid at least one package.. never bothered to check wether it arrived..