I’m a big fan of the NPR show Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Unfortunately, their site recently become even more unusable: they don’t use ordinary hyper-links, instead they use a javascript function to create a hyperlink from some parameters:

href=“javascript:getMedia (‘FA,’ ‘02-Sep–2003,’ ‘ALL,’ ‘RM,WM’);”

Unfortunately, I can’t find a browser that this will work with, besides Microsoft’s IE. Yes, apparently, only users of a single (and rather old and buggy) browser are permitted to listen to Freshair. Lovely.

Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to create a python script that creates the day’s audio file (SMIL) such that I can listen to it at my convenience without having to worry about their broken web site.

Ported/Archived Responses

anthony on 2003-09-05

Wow, that is particularly bad javascript. I like how they decide to compare dates by breaking each date down into an array of values, and then comparing those rather than that silly old way of just getting the raw timestamp and comparing that.