DataWeb: The Horror Stories A talk given at the Institutional Web Management Workshop, Newcastle, 15-17 September 1998: DataWeb: The Horror Stories A talk given at the Institutional Web Management Workshop, Newcastle, 15-17 September 1998 Victoria Marshall and Kevin O'Neill, CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory


Contents: Contents The mysterious case of the vanishing HTML The mysterious case of the 'elapsed time' unreality log entry Snakes in the grass: The case of .asp and Harvest The disastrous case of cloned section text The case of the UNICODE gif file We should adhere to the latest W3C standards But... Apologies


The mysterious case of the vanishing HTML: The mysterious case of the vanishing HTML Typing HTML into TEXTAREAs worked fine with Netscape Typing HTML into Internet Explorer TEXTAREAs lost it all The browscap.ini file Such an obvious filename! So easy to find 5 levels down in the directory structure What happened the next week...


The browsercap.ini File: The browsercap.ini File [IE 1.5] browser=IE version=1.5 majorver=#1 minorver=#5 frames=FALSE tables=TRUE cookies=TRUE backgroundsounds=FALSE vbscript=FALSE javascript=FALSE javaapplets=FALSE beta=False Win16=False [Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 1.5; Windows NT)] parent=IE 1.5 platform=WinNT [Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 1.5; Windows 95)] parent=IE 1.5 platform=Win95 C:\WINNT\system32\inetsrv\ASP\Cmpnts\browscap.ini


The mysterious case of the 'elapsed time' unreality log entry: The mysterious case of the 'elapsed time' unreality log entry MIIS log files maintain client IP address (but not name), timestamp, server IP address, http method (GET, HEAD etc), target URL, return code, number of bytes transferred etc as well as something called 'Elapsed time' The documentation (all half a page of it) indicates that this is the time taken (in milliseconds) between the user clicking on a link and the requested page coming back It isn't, and we still don't know exactly what it is The results


Snakes in the grass: The case of .asp and Harvest: Snakes in the grass: The case of .asp and Harvest Many search engines cannot handle unknown file extensions such as ASP Even more search engines don't attempt to index anything with a ? in the URL Mapping DLL


The disastrous case of cloned section text: The disastrous case of cloned section text One evening, someone was editing the text of an activity and successfully (and accidentally) managed to overwrite every field of every record in the database with the same text


The case of the UNICODE gif file: The case of the UNICODE gif file We wanted to use ASP to transfer a file from the client to the server Text files were fine, but gifs were handled as a byte stream so required a UNICODE file The \0\0 word problem The 377 376 problem (We gave up and used Java!)


We should adhere to the latest W3C standards: We should adhere to the latest W3C standards RAL was one of the first members of W3C RAL is co-host with INRIA to the European end of W3C DCI is a partner with INRIA in a Leveraging Action to encourage greater uptake of Web technologies throughout Europe Of course we should implement W3C standards!


But...: But... Idealism meets reality... Use Style Sheets and reduce the number of gifs on each page But IE-5 is still only in Beta... Use XML to make our pages more readable Do you want to try explaining *that* to everyone in the dept? Use PNG image format How many browsers (other than Amaya) support this?


Apologies: Apologies Sorry, Microsoft Many of these 'horror stories' are the inevitable teething troubles with a new technology If anyone can help explain some of these, feel free