Re: [cobalt-users] [XTR] Admin Left hand Navigation buttons gone in Mozilla Firefox

[astorm <astorm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, March 8, 2004, at 10:55 AM, Ligard, Vidar wrote:
> I thought the JavaScript was only used client side to maybe fill in 
> some
> default fields in a form. Once I click the "Submit" button to do
> anything, the information is transmitted as POST code to the http
> server, and the perl/cgi takes over from there. It's not javaScript 
> that
> actually makes any of the changes.

What you're saying is technically correct.  Javascript is only used to 
change things on the client side.  However, failure to work on the 
client side could impact things on the server side.

Here's a generic example.  Let's say a page had a hidden form field 
that passes some value to the server side script.  Let's also say that 
when you submit the form, a javascript function is called that sets the 
values of this hidden field.  If the javascript that does this doesn't 
work in your browser the form may not submit.  Worse, it may fail 
silently, submit the form,  but never set the value of the hidden 
field.  If the server side script gets a blank value where is was 
expecting a real value, "bad things" could happen.

Here's another example.  Some web applications developers will write a 
separate server side page for each task in an attempt to modularize 
their code.  In the case of the Cobalts, this might mean there's one 
script/page for adding a user, and another script/page for adding the 
email aliases.  When you go to add/edit a user, the form would POST to 
the page that adds a user, and then would be redirected to the "page" 
that adds aliases.  If the redirect is handled via javascript, and the 
javascript doesn't work, you're once again in store for "bad things". 
(this is a MADE UP example, I don't know if the RAQs work this way)

I haven't dug that deeply into the web application code on the XTR, so 
I don't know if any of these concerns are justified.  However, 
considering the hyper-finickiness of the XTR in general, I'll probably 
keep using IE to access our RAQs until we phase them out.

--
Alan Storm
astorm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx