My website (www.louisville.com) has recently added a classified advertising feature provided by a third-party vendor. Most of it works fine on a Mac, but one feature -- the ability to send an email reply to the seller -- does not.
This feature uses a javascript-powered pop-up form that is supposed to send the email after the form is filled out and the user clicks on a "Submit" button. Works fine on a PC running Windows using Internet Explorer. On a Mac, using Safari, Firefox or IE 5.2, everything works up until clicking the "Submit" button. On mouseover of that button, the status bar displays: Run script "SubmitContactSection();" But, when the user clicks the button, nothing happens (in Windows IE, an email message is sent to the seller and a message appears confirming that the email was sent). When contacted about this lack of Mac functionality, the developers claim (I'm getting this second-hand, through a sales rep, so it may not be an entirely accurate representation) that adding the code that would make this work in Safari on a Mac is too complex a task and one that they are not willing to undertake. They claim that the conditional logic underlying this function uses (about) six "if-then" conditional tests for the Windows version of Internet Explorer, but that the same functionality would require (about) 50 "if-then" conditional tests to work with Safari (or, they imply, other Mac browsers). This sounds to me like a bunch of hooey, but I'm neither a javascript nor HTML programmer and I do not have access to their code. Does this make sense to those of you out there who do know something about such programming? If not, can you suggest some probing questions that I might ask the developers -- or better yet, some procedures they might try (including links to online resources if available) to overcome this flaw? By the way, I have tried changing the "User Agent" in both Safari and Firefox to see if that would work, but it does not. If you would like to see this feature in action (or lack thereof), go to: http://www.dealstorm.com/portalWeb/portal.aspx? &ctype=3&groupid=466&channelid=1799&categoryid=5565&subcategoryid=588&pa gename=smexchangetree&itemid=16087659 and click on the "Contact Seller" link -- (the same applies to the "Email This" and "Make an Offer" links). I'm the seller of this item, so if you succeed in sending any emails, they will come to me. (And hey, if you're looking for a nice car. . .) Dan Crutcher -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060729/5e08123d/attachment.html
