Gemal's Psyched Blog - Comments on The use of W3C standards in Denmark

By Jacob

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 12:10:49 +0100

I followed a link to http://www.netsteder.dk ( part of Ministry for Science ) On Mozilla Firefox you can switch to an alternative stylesheet from the statusbar to get larger letters on the screen. This works well. But if you try to use the buttons on the right side of the screen to get some bigger letters nothing happens. (it works in IE)

If you go to http://www.netsteder.dk/omknapper.html there is more about the the bottons. It says it should work on Mozilla, but it doesn't. Anybody have a clue what is wrong?

By Henrik Gemal

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 13:28:46 +0100

It doesn't work because of an JavaScript error:

Error: a.getAttribute("rel") has no properties
Source File: http://www.netsteder.dk/scripts/styleswitcher.js
Line: 4

By

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:09:32 +0100

A bit of testing reveals what that the problem is.The script erroneously assumes that every link element will have a rel-attribute. This is not the case on the page in question, since one of the fist lines in the source reads:(note "rev", not "rel").The problem can be solved by replacing "a.getAttribute("rel").indexOf("style") != -1" with "a.getAttribute("rel") && a.getAttribute("rel").indexOf("style") != -1" all (3) places it occurs in the script code.

By

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:16:21 +0100

If anyone is interested, I have uploadet a working example with the modified script: http://www.gyros.dk/usenet/html/styleskift.shtml

The javascript is located here:
http://www.gyros.dk/usenet/js/styleswitch.js

By

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 14:24:51 +0100

Argh! - I've just discovered that the html-code I entered in my first comment was "eaten" by the blog system. I would have thought that it was possible to enter html-codes here (and have them encoded serverside), but that is appearently not so. I can see that it is possible to encode the code when it is entered (writing < instead of < and > instead of >). Below is the missing code from before:

By Jacob Riis

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 23:27:52 +0100

I just ckecked netsteder.dk .They have fixed the problem :-)

By

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 14:59:52 +0100

Yes. I wrote to them after I had pinpointed the problem. Two days later (wednesday, 10. March) I got a friendly reply from netsteder.dk where a consultant promised to correct the problem. The corrected version is now online.

I have also contacted A List Apart, where the background article about the styleswitcher resides. I have recieved a single reply telling that
a) comments are disabled on older articles (the article is from 2001)
b) they normally doesn't update older articles.

They have mentioned a possibility to mark the article as "outdated information", to which I replied that the article isn't really outdated - the problem with the script has been there since the article was posted. Furthermore, the script in general is not at all bad - it can be useful to a lot of people. The only problem is that the script doesn't take into account that there may exist link-tags without rel-attributes. This can easily be corrected.

I haven't seen a response to my second mail.

By SlashEMc2k

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 11:24:57 +0100

Thanks guys I was stuck trying to figure out how to fix this problem but good old google led me to you :)

By Virignia Knight

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:29:28 +0100

Thank you too. I was led to you be searching on styleswitcher and "has no properties".