Presentation Transcript
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