For the last three months the Honda Owner Link website has a pseudo-popup dialog that appears when you log in. This pseudo-popup is an attempt to enroll you into email-only statements, which I do not want to do. It has two buttons, "cancel", and "continue". Unfortunately using either Opera or Firefox on Linux these buttons do not work and you can't make the pseudo-popup go away. I say pseudo-popup because they use some tricky CSS code to make it look like a popup, but is overlayed over the actual page and the actual page content is inaccessible while the "popup" remains. So, having it there prevents me from accessing my account and paying my bill. I know that what I should do is email their customer support and complain about the broken, poorly programmed page. But that's too much hassle.

So instead I use my knowledge of the internets to get around the problem. In January I typed in a broken URL to the page so that it would prompt me with their custom 404 FILE NOT FOUND page, which contains a link to my account information page, but no luck, the popup shows up there too. So I instead typed in a URL which sent me to a "home" page of their system, which luckily had its own direct link for "Pay your bill online". So I used that for January, and again in February.

The page still not being fixed in March, I found an easier way around it using the miracle of the Firebug extension to Firefox. I fired up Firebug, clicked "Inspect", selected the "popup" and then right-clicked on the source code display and selected "Delete Element". The pseudo-popup box went bye-bye, and I had normal access to the entire site. I am very pleased with knowing how to get around crappily programmed webpages.

My other beef with their system is that when you type in your username and password, those forms aren't connected to the "Submit" button, so pressing Enter after typing your password does nothing. You have to use the mouse to click on the button. So needlessly broken.

Oh, I tried accessing the page with Javascript disabled, but that doesn't make the "popup" go away, instead it just makes all the buttons not work, every single button on their site is built using javascript. It's just such a poorly written website, and fails pretty much every "industry best practice" out there. Sad really.

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