miscoded

Understanding other people's workarounds can be simply impossible. Take this example from the popular creative forum deviantART: if a member tries submitting a new entry from Opera, it will appear impossible to upload files because the "Choose" button does nothing when clicked. (Tabbing to it and pressing enter will work, but who'd think of that..)

The reason is buried deep inside this JS file:

if (window.browser && (browser.isGecko || browser.isOpera)) {
     uploadForm.onmousedown = function () { return false; }; // firefox only - screws up other browsers
}

So this "Firefox only" workaround against an unspecified problem I can't begin to understand is also applied to Opera - with the fatal result that we ignore any mouse clicks inside the upload form because the script cancels mousedown. I'm not sure who's deviating from what here..

(As an aside, code like this makes me pretty curious - what will show up in the site if I throw in a small user JS to set deviantART.pageData.i_am_super_privileged to true?

// most awesome hack ever
if (!path[1] && whoosh[0] == 'Fan Art' && deviantART.pageData && deviantART.pageData.i_am_super_privileged)

source)

Busy with my regular passtime eBay JavaScript browsing (I think I spend more time on their site reading their .js files than looking at auction listings) I came across this:

var ebAllowClick=true;function ebDCKillCheckMousedown()
{if(ebAllowClick)
{ebAllowClick=false;setTimeout("ebAllowClick=true;",1250);}}
document.onclick=ebDCKillCheckMousedown;

Now, there is nothing technically wrong with that but I'm not terribly impressed with the quality of this snippet. Actually I find it hard to believe that a site with the scale and resources of eBay doesn't do review their scripts more carefully for efficiency.. but rather than me launching into one of my familiar rants I'll just pass the buck this time: so, if you were to teach the author a thing or two about efficient JavaScripting, what would you say?

Edit: proofreading the posted post I noticed yet another bug, not just performance improvements stuff..