JavaScript Error at feeds.adobe.com

JavaScript Error at feeds.adobe.com

Posted by Brad Wood
Aug 25, 2008 06:09:00 UTC
Have I been the only person constantly annoyed by the JavaScript error that pops up on EVERY SINGLE page at feeds.adobe.com? Apparently you only get the message in IE. It is related to some site tracking code called SiteCatalyst and apparently doesn't run for Firefox. I kept assuming Adobe would fix it, but it's been weeks, so I finally fired up MS Fiddler to have a look.Naturally, IE's JS error messages are about as useful as the ones Twitter cranks out. I figured it was the usual though-- A missing JavaScript file returning the HTML of a site-wide 404 handler. Obviously IE doesn't have much luck when it comes to parsing HTML as JS. I loaded the page and looked at my HTTP requests in Fiddler. No 404's were being returned, so it was definitely picking up a custom 404. I clicked over to the Session Inspector tab of Fiddler to view the raw HTTP response of each of the JS requests. Sure enough, there is a request for http://feeds.adobe.com/uber/js/omtr_tc.js which returns an HTML page stating, "The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable." I viewed source for the main feeds.adobe.com page, but didn't see the omtr_tc.js file name anywhere. It must be included from another JS file. I scanned back through my JS files, and noticed one located at http://www.macromedia.com/uber/js/omniture_s_code.js which sends back a 301 redirect to http://www.adobe.com/uber/js/omniture_s_code.js. Sure enough, omniture_s_code.js references our missing file with this path:
/uber/js/omtr_tc.js
So what's the problem here? Our base URL for the main page is http://feeds.adobe.com/ but our JS file is located at http://www.adobe.com/ For the record, http://www.macromedia.com/uber/js/omtr_tc.js provides an 301 redirect to the www.adobe.com location. So the moral of the story-- watch out when you include JS files from one domain to another when they contain relative URLs in them. I can think of 3 fixes off the top of my head:
  1. Copy the JS files to feeds.adobe.com or create a virtual directory for them.
  2. Put a 301 redirect in place at feeds.adobe.com to point to www.adobe.com
  3. Edit the JS files at www.adobe.com to have fully qualified path names in them.
Mystery solved. I guess I need to go dig out someone's E-mail address now to bug about this. Maybe I can mention the ridiculous amount of Arabic(?) recent searches on their home page. Are those for real??

 


Brad Wood

Props to Adobe. I heard back within a couple days of E-mailing them to say they would look into the problem. I just received word that the bug has been fixed and fixed it is!

For the record, they went with option 3 and fully qualified the path to the JS file.

Thanks Adobe!

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