IE 5.x and javascript conflict

[stuu]

Hello. I've recently 'finished' a site which uses a nice popup menu. It works fine on the browsers I tested on except IE5 on a Mac - it just doesn't pop up.

www.tdi-ltd.co.uk/welcome.htm

Can any help me sort this? It's very important that it works on a Mac.

cheers

[Phil Karras]

A little code would help. I went to your site & nothing popped-up so I guess I didn't hit the right thing. That's the problem with just giving a URL link.

I'm using IE6.0 on Windows XP.

[stuu]

nothing? I find that hard to believe. If you roll over 'about tdi' or 'open courses' you'll find a little pop up menu.

I've checked the link and it works fine. can you try again?

I'm also using XP and IE 6

[Phil Karras]

Ahh, pop-up is used to describe the window.open() method window that pops-up as a seperate window.

A rollover is not a pop-up. Symantics. Yes there were roll-overs, see what mean about a little code going a long way?

[stuu]

well that's just nit picking, isn't it? Alright, the rollovers: any ideas why the sub menus aren't displaying on Mac IE 5.x?

[Charles]

It won't work on a lot of browsers. But consider that only about 2% of users use a Mac (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/os.php) but a good 13% don't use JavaScript at all (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/May/javas.php). Don't worry about the Mac users, worry about us JavaScript free folks. Make sure that your page works without JavaScript as well as it does with JavaScript and then you Mac problem will also go away.

[stuu]

Yeah, that's a good point and I respect that not all users use Javascript. What I'm interested in is the why. I've been a Mac user and I've used Javascript on a Mac - why doesn't this code work? Trust me, if I had my way I wouldn't worry about the Mac users but in this instants I can't ignore them. I don't really want to scrap the menu, I'd much rather fix it. But, if it can't be done quickly, I'm going to need a rollover menu system that does work on a Mac.

Any ideas at all would be fantastic.

[Charles]

I'm not suggesting that you ignore your Mac users but that you simply treat them like the JavaScript free. None of your Mac users are going to care if the DHTML menu doesn't work for them as long as there is some other method of navigation available.

[stuu]

I wish it were that simple - I'd just use simple links to attach the pages. However, I didn't design the site - simply built it. It's all a very bad way to build a site I know but I'm just doing my job. The designers of the site - a different company use Macs (being designers) and the menu idea was a key feature of the site. Unfortunatley, they're not web designers - they just expect it to work. Another alternative would be to use Flash but I really don't want to do that as, I'm sure, you'll appreciate.

[Charles]

Since you are in the UK, you can draw their attention to the "Disability Discrimination Act 1995" (See http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/01-2/sloan.html for an overview of disability law and the internet in the UK.) and to the W3C's priority 1 accessibility guideline, "Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported." (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/wai-pageauth.html#tech-scripts) If an appeal to reason will not let then see the light and give you more time and money to do the job right, perhaps the threat of a law suit might.

[stuu]

Blimey. Ok, I think I'll link the pages. Just to be safe. No ideas on a code fix though?