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[LUG] Cornwall County Council website



Today I spent an hour sompleting an online form applying for a job at CCC
using Mozilla on Linux. Of course CCC website is designed and implemented
by inexperienced and unqualified amateurs (.asp in the url is usually a
bad starting point when visiting a site) and I was unable to submit the
form in either opera or mozilla because it used VBScript yo validate !!!

Now the obvious thing to do is to downhload the page and remove the
validation by hand - because 99% of asp developers won't do any serverside
validation. I tried this and the frontpage (dear god do these people have
no shame?) generated source code was larger than my copy and paste buffer
(KDE Kipper tool) and was chock full of gibberish, nonsense ASCII and
whitespace (not indenting - just horrid dos linefeeds). rather than waste
another hour demoronising their website I called and was pleasently
surprised when I was called back by someboy responsable for 'the
internet'.

Unfortunately when I described the problem - being unable to submit the
form because it is VBScript and only IE on windows has VBSscript and I am
not going to buy and inatll windows just to submit one form on their
website, I was called back and asked if there was an error at some line..
obviously even the vbscript (serverside too apparently) doesn't even work.
I pointed out again that only internet explorer supports vbscript and that
it needs to be written in javascript and that to do so would take anybody
who knows what they are doing under ten minutes.

Needless to say it hasn't been fixed and they have no intention of fixing
it. Even if I had time to print and post the form - it is so badly
designed that unless you can describe your qualifications in these than
30 words and have only ever had 4 jobs and 3 qualifications you can't fit
much in it.

Anyway I plan to contact the council more formally complaining about this
gross oversight - I mean in all the time I have been using and working on
the internet - never have I found a page so poorly thought out to use
vbscript validation. There is only one place to use vbscript and that is
to detect plugins in internet explorer because it is so lame and doesn't
support javascript properly.

yours disgruntledly,

Aaron - still wondering why a cornish boy should bother getting a degree
when all cornwall has to offer is waiting tables for minimum wage in a
hotel or cleaning hospitals. What point in having a university in cornwall
if there are no jibs for graduates within 100 miles ?


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