HCMC Blogs

Fixed bugs and added enhancements as follows:

• JavaScript error in IE was fixed. This was the famous "Unknown runtime error" that is sometimes mysteriously generated when you set innerHTML. There's no discernible reason for this, and the only fix I could find was to change the id attribute on the target element I was writing to. An hour wasted on a stupid IE bug.
• The browsers that can't display the progress bar needed something equivalent, so I've added a little wait message with scrolling dots, which appears and extends while a request is in progress. I've also set the cursor to 'wait' during the request.
• There was a bug in the implementation of the ethnicity grouping creation, whereby you could press the return key in the ethnicity grouping name box and cause a previously-created group to be deleted, instead of creating a new one. That's now fixed.
• Table cell borders were invisible in IE; that was my typo in the CSS, where I used "grey" instead of "gray".
• One or two other things have been tidied up.

All changes tested and working on IE7, Safari, Opera and Firefox.

There's one place in the CityStats wizard where the user provides a name for their ethnicity grouping. Because this is free text, but submitted as part of an XML document which is POSTed to the server, I need to escape any ampersands or angle brackets. However, I've discovered that if I submit entities (either named or numeric), then the PHP DomDocument::LoadXML() function fails when it hits the first entity; conversely, if I don't escape (say) an ampersand, it fails because of that! Yet another reason for despising PHP.

The only solution I can find is to replace ampersands with literal "and", and angle brackets with literal "greater than" and "less than". What a pain. I think for us, with our types of project, PHP is only really useful for includes; for anything with Unicode or XML it's hopeless.

Also set off the Step Back buttons to the right, to make the wizard interface a bit clearer. Next I'm going to see if I can figure out what IE is choking on.

On instructions from RS, changed the 100A 2003 to 2002, and also rebuilt the index pages for those years. They also had broken image links, which are fixed. Everything should be working OK now.

I've now got working source files for the Spanish 100 practice exam site, and I've reworked and rebuilt all the following exam sets: 100A 2001, 2004 and 2007m and 100B 2001 and 2007. The "2003" exams (one of which is described in its own index as from 2002) have no HotPot source files, so they'll need to be retyped into HotPot at some point. I've also reworked all the index pages to remove lots of broken links, and some annoyances (such as target="_blank" nonsense everywhere).

There's now a Masher batch file for the whole buildable set in the root, so we can rebuild everything easily in the event of a change. Reported to RS, and I'm now waiting to see if there's any workstudy time available to re-create the HotPot files for the 2003 exercises.

Started rebuilding old practice exercises...

Based on some editorial feedback from HM, I've reduced the size of the images on the page to 4" wide (discovering in the process that FOP 0.20.5 doesn't support content-width, but if you just set width, it does scale the content proportionately). I also increased the space between the footer top border and the text above to a quarter of an inch.

Then I tackled endnote numbers, discovering that if you set the font size, that seems to undermine the application of the vertical-align and/or baseline-shift properties, so I've left the font size for endnote numbers in the text as default, and now I have superscripting. The link is also working, although FOP's positioning of the hot area is always slightly off. I fixed a bug that was causing all in-text footnote numbers to be "1" (xsl:number never does quite what you expect). Finally, I noticed a situation in which a URL was not having zero-width wrapping spaces inserted, and it turned out to be because it starts with https, and I was crudely trapping for http://. I'm now just looking for http, which should do the job. We may have to complicate it a bit for ftp and other protocols at some stage, but you don't see them as much as you used to.

I've now added a PDF link to the document XHTML output, so all articles are available as PDF.

The Wheelock Latin site has 40 units, each with an index page, produced automatically from Hot Potatoes. These pages are generated using a template file (a HotPot source file). The pages were non-standard HTML, designed many years ago by a workstudy student and they also had an annoying link at the bottom, which went to a preliminary site page rather than to the index of units, which is what people would really want.

I decided to rework the HTML into valid XHTML 1.1, to go with the exercises, and fix the link. This proved really complicated, as the original design was a classic Fireworks slice-and-dice image table thing. Converting the code to XHTML was simple enough, but when I added the XHTML 1.1 DTD to the header, I got instant layout issues. This turns out to be caused mainly by the fact that images are inline by default in XHTML, so where they're inside table cells, you get an extra bit of space below each one. See this excellent page for a helpful explanation. Even after fixing that problem, there were more issues, some caused by the extra space generated by the (rather gratuitous) use of underline and overline for the header and footer elements (which I abandoned), and others caused by the need to specify exact cell sizes in some places, and to remove absolutely all whitespace between table rows and cells.

I should really have rewritten the whole layout with divs, but that would have taken even longer. Eventually we'll do that. At the same time, I'll rewrite the site intro pages in the same way.

Leaving a bit early.

Finally got the tables to display according to APA guidelines. It appears that borders only work reliably on table cells, and you can only get them to display different top/bottom from right/left borders by explicitly specifying every style, width and colour for the borders. It was setting the right/left borders to white that finally "suppressed" them. For the bottom border of the table, I had to add a bottom border to cells in the final row.

I then trimmed the space-after attribute for all headings, resulting in text that looked better -- it appears you want gaps between sections, but not between headings and their following paragraphs -- and virtually no instances of widows (which is luck, but the odds are better when there's a smaller space-after).

As far as I can see, I have only one remaining problem: I simply can't find a way to make footnote numbers appear superscripted in the text. According to the FOP compliance table, it should support baseline-shift: super, but it just doesn't work; and vertical-align, which should also be able to take a value of super, fails too. There may be some combination of settings I can use to make it function; I'll need to experiment.

PG, who's been working for RS as a workstudy on this, sent me the Hot Potatoes materials for the Spanish 100A 2007 exams, and I've spent the morning building some source files to create the unit for the Website. Here's the result.

There are a couple of issues still to fix. First, with the exception of Part IX, there are no descriptive elements in the exercise titles; I think it would be a good idea to provide these. I've asked RS for these, on the model of the 2004 100A set.

Secondly, I've asked RS to compare the two index pages above. The old index pages were built with bad-old-days HTML, and had to be created manually; the new one is XHTML and is built automatically from a Hot Potatoes source file I've created, which means that all past and future index pages can be automatically generated on this template without hand-coding. What I'd like to do is take the old practice exams, and migrate them over to Hot Potatoes 6, then build them with the new templates, so that they all match, and they're easy to add to and maintain. In the new template, I've tried to reproduce fairly closely what the original index pages looked like, but obviously that can't be done precisely (the originals, for instance, used images for unit titles, which is a no-no for accessibility reasons). Also, I noticed that the old index pages have broken links at the bottom; the "Main Menu" link goes erroneously to the practice exercise site, rather than the exam site index, and the link to EET's email address is obviously obsolete. I've fixed those issues in my index template.

Once RS signs off on the new template, we can start rebuilding the old exercises. I've looked at what's on the site, and these are the ones we have data files for:

• 100A 2001
• 100A 2004
• 100B 2001
• 100B 2004

We don't have data files for the 2003 exercises, for some reason, so those would have to be re-typed into Hot Potatoes, or abandoned, or left in their old format.