I See This A Lot Now.....

[wurzel]

Unpopulated dropdown lists on websites.

Normally happens when I'm buying something online e.g. airline tickets - you spend ages filling in all the forms then you get to the last page and have to select some mandatory value from a combo box and there ain't anything in it!

Sometimes closing the browser and starting again fixes it but not always. I see this on my PC at work and both my home PCs from time to time and I get it with IE as well as Firefox. Sure this never used to happen much in the past, just wondering if some new technology was at fault e.g. .net or ajax (not much of a front end developer myself). Drives me nuts though!

[bogeyman]

Unpopulated dropdown lists on websites.

Normally happens when I'm buying something online e.g. airline tickets - you spend ages filling in all the forms then you get to the last page and have to select some mandatory value from a combo box and there ain't anything in it!

Sometimes closing the browser and starting again fixes it but not always. I see this on my PC at work and both my home PCs from time to time and I get it with IE as well as Firefox. Sure this never used to happen much in the past, just wondering if some new technology was at fault e.g. .net or ajax (not much of a front end developer myself). Drives me nuts though!

Never seen that. What about if you do 'view source' - are there any <option> tags in the <select>?

If not it looks like a server-side issue.

[wurzel]

Never seen that. What about if you do 'view source' - are there any <option> tags in the <select>?

If not it looks like a server-side issue.

Can't replicate the problem now, typical! I'll check that next time though.

[dang65]

Sure this never used to happen much in the past, just wondering if some new technology was at fault e.g. .net or ajax (not much of a front end developer myself). Drives me nuts though!

Ajax probably. It goes off to the server and gets options dependent on what you selected in previous parts of the form, and if that call fails, or if there are no relevant options returned, then a bad interface will leave you in this state of frustration.

Still, it's nice when it works.

[NickFitz]

Ajax probably. It goes off to the server and gets options dependent on what you selected in previous parts of the form, and if that call fails, or if there are no relevant options returned, then a bad interface will leave you in this state of frustration.

Still, it's nice when it works.

implementation

The problem is that so many front-end coders (and indeed quite a few back-end ones) don't understand distributed applications. They never have an HTTP failure running on localhost, so they stick their code into the world without any HTTP error handling.

The first of the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing is "The network is reliable." Being victims of this fallacy, many of them don't even bother checking for an HTTP status code of 200 OK. Throw them a 500 Internal Server Error, and they'll attempt to stuff the error message into the <select>, which of course fails miserably.

And don't get me started on sites that return a page that says 404 Not Found but with an HTTP status of 200 OK