Slides for talk given at IWMW 1998 held at the University of Newcastle on 15-17 September 1998. See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-sep1998/materials/

1. 1
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

2. 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. 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. 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:WINNTsystem32inetsrvASPCmpntsbrowscap.ini

5. 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. 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. 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. 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 00 word problem
The 377 376 problem
(We gave up and used Java!)

9. 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. 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. 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