Here in sunny South Africa we're also gearing up for elections. Granted, not quite with the international significance as those over in the US, but it could be argued that my local government is just as likely to affect my day to day existence.

I'm obviously registered as a voter, but I wanted to check on Friday where, having recently moved district. Conveniently our local Independent Electoral Commission has a site you can enter your details, and check your registration status. I popped on over, and got this message:

I haven't seen that for quite some time. Brought me right back to the turn of the millennium. It's clearly been updated recently (notice the mention of Chrome), but hell's teeth. I luckily use windows and have the option of IE (in fairness, they do mention IE 4 and greater, so in theory some adventurous mac users could have a go at it). But we're in a country whose government has openly embraced open source software. We're the birthplace and oftentimes home of he who is called Mark, arguably the one most likely to take Linux to the masses.

I took a look at the output html, and, in and amongst all the scary ASP.NET-and-Web-Forms-Designer-bastard-child HTML I think I found the reason non-IE browsers are not supported, called on load of the body:

<script language="vbscript"> 

Sub ShowMsg()

    if len(trim("")) > 1 then 

        msgbox("")

    end if 

End sub 

</script>

Now I'm no expert in vbscript (I missed that bus, and its route seems to have been cancelled), but my powers of deduction tell me that this one doesn't do much. Did anyone think to check the output html? Did anyone peruse the code that resulted in this? Perhaps a code review is too much to ask for, but having a developer on the team who leaves this in all the way to production is more a liability than an asset.

Come on guys, sort it out. This is important. I'm happy to lend a hand - drop me a line, I'll happily donate a few hours a week.