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Victoria Marshall and Kevin O'Neill, CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

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. The mysterious case of the vanishing HTML

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Victoria Marshall and Kevin O'Neill, CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

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

  2. 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

  3. 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...

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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!)

  9. 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!

  10. 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?

  11. 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

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