Clueless web designers are indeed everywhere

After seeing Martin Brooks rant follwed by Rev. Simon Rumble detail issues he'd had with an online timesheet it reminded me of an experience I had. I recently finished a contract at a UK retail company. They have quite a number of consultants on site and use agencies to manage some aspects of paying and ...

After seeing Martin Brooks rant follwed by Rev. Simon Rumble detail issues he’d had with an online timesheet it reminded me of an experience I had.

I recently finished a contract at a UK retail company. They have quite a number of consultants on site and use agencies to manage some aspects of paying and accounting for them. Spring have a company services page where consultants like myself can upload our timesheets. Luckily we don’t have to go through the hoops that Simon detailed in his blog post, but the site is still shockingly badly written.

There is an invoice upload procedure that for the most part works fairly well if you run Windows. It completely fails on any other platform, which means I couldn’t upload my invoices from any machine my company owns because they all run Linux. The system requirements page details the operating system must be Windows NT, 2k or XP and the browser must be IE5 or above. Er – hel-lo! Yet again some idiot web designer seems to think Microsoft == the web.

Ok, so what’s the problem? Well, on the upload page – which you won’t be able to see without a logon, so you’re going to have to trust me on this, there is a lovely bit of JavaScript validation. Here it is.

//Check to ensure that there is a backslash in the path, do not let them just type out the path
//like a: invoice.doc
if ((document.frmContractorUpload.fldDocs.value).indexOf("\\") == -1)
{
alert("Please clear the Document Path and try uploading the Document again \nusing the 'Browse..' button from a Windows environment.");
return false;
}

Yes, that’s right, if you don’t have “\” in the path to your invoice, you can’t upload it. So those of us that any other operating system like oh I dunno Mac OSX, or Linux are screwed because we all use “/” as our separator between directories and filenames.

Yes, I did contact them twice explaining the issue and got absolutely nothing in return. It’s still like that over a year later.

Incidentally to all those Windows weenies who think we have it wrong, you’ll find Unix (which BSD [underneath Mac OSX] and Linux are modelled on) existed long before DOS and Windows even supported directories/folders, sorry directories\folders.

Bah!