TiVo’s updated support pages not friendly to non-IE browsers
TiVo recently updated their support pages, which has broken many links around the net since they seem to have moved pretty much every page and didn’t have the server redirect the old URLs to the new one. (Which is bad form in and of itself.) The new TiVo support pages seem to be IE only. Try to access any of the user guides, for example. Visit http://customersupport.tivo.com/UserGuides.aspx in Firefox and try to access a guide. For that matter try it in Opera.
The only browser it worked for me in is IE - which I normally refuse to use since it is crap (OK, IE7 is less crappy, I admit) and a common security hole. I don’t have a Mac so I don’t know if this works in Safari, but if not, then Mac users are effectively locked out since IE hasn’t been supported on Mac in years. And Linux users almost all use Firefox/Gecko based browsers, or Opera - no IE at all.
This is why there are web standards, which the pages do not follow. I mean, look at this:
<td><a id=744cd5bf7aa5604e36e11e3ed0a66b0f76d1cfe3 href=”#”></a><a id=bdabe80e8a00edc384c222e4431ff28a4e37fa30 cid=’ebee533b-f9c5-4014-b80b-0c44b2dee10a’ parameters=”samewindow~ins_Content.html~” href=”#”><img src=”Media_Resources/images/3028/ug_series3HD.gif” border=0 imgid=”80013e96-c95b-472f-a0fe-901b94e2cdc9″></a><a id=c35905bc56737b73edfa6de9a78bcea164f9ee76 href=”#”></a></td>
That’s the markup for the Series3 entry in the table. If you know HTML, you’ll immediately notice the links are bogus. And there are invalid attributes to boot. Everything is driven by an JavaScript function. Scripted links with no HTML fall back are NEVER a good idea. EVER. That’s just bad web design. If you want a (bitter) laugh, open the page with Firefox’s JavaScript Console open and watch the errors stream by. So not only did they break standards support, their broken version uses code that is broken.
In fact, here is the JavaScript, behind the cut…
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