Hi guys,
We are experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment. Please do bear with us whilst we try and bring both sites back up again.
Kind regards,
Eileen
Update: We are now back online!
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Technical difficulties
September 3rd, 2007
中文 Chinese
Richard Sharpe Says:
September 3rd, 2007 at 1:53 pm
I hesitate to report problems once again, as it seems that the response in the past has been disbelief until I provided fragments of HTML that demonstrate the exact problem, or promises to try something but then not reporting back about the issue, but:
This page: Intermediate - Old Friend has problems.
In particular, on the following line of the dialog in the dialog section:
A: 哪里。一般。很小的公司。哎，高中毕业以后，我怎么就联系不到你了？
The mouse-over displays of the characters, pinyin and meaning stops after 就 and starts up again at 你. This seems like the same problem that I painstakingly reported long ago.
Has it not been fixed yet?
I think the problem is here in the piece of HTML emitted to handle 联系不到:
联系不到
Note that the tip English meaning is “can’t contact”, however, it is surrounded by single quotes, which breaks the quotes, because of the single quote in “can’t.”
This really shouldn’t happen.
Richard Sharpe Says:
September 3rd, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Arrgh. Trying again with the fragment of HTML. I forgot to convert angle brackets to codes:
<span onclick=”onWordClick()” onmouseover=”tip(event,’can’t contact’,'lian2xi4 bu5dao4′,’联系不到’,'聯繫不到’)” onmouseout=”htip()”>联系不到</span>
Richard Sharpe Says:
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Actually, I should retract this statement:
This seems like the same problem that I painstakingly reported long ago.
It is not the same as the problem I reported before, which was that the engine ChinesePod was using simply forgot to emit HTML for some elements for some reason.
In this case, it is emitting HTML for the element, but they forgot to properly handle embedded quotes. CS 101 stuff.
Richard Sharpe Says:
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:19 pm
However, I notice that on another page, the following appears:
<span onclick=”onWordClick()” onmouseover=”tip(event,’one\’s own’,'zi4ji3 de5′,’自己的’,'自己的’)” onmouseout=”htip()”>自己的</span>
So, it’s not simply a matter of forgetting to handle embedded quotes in all cases.
John B Says:
September 4th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Richard,
Thanks for the comments. This is something we’re working on, but the changes involve more than just a single line of code, and so it takes time. Of course we want to and try to get everything right the first time but — surprise! — we’re humans and we make mistakes. We also have to prioritize our bug fixes, and things do get lost in the shuffle. We’re sorry.
I assure you that it’s not a case of us ignoring your problems, though as the saying goes “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” That applies to both technical support and fly-catching.
If find any other issues, please feel free to contact me directly at john.biesnecker@praxislanguage.com and I will work to get them taken care of.
trevelyan Says:
September 4th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Richard and John,
We’re aware of the javascript issue. As you notice the problem occurs with a minority of popups which are largely concentrated in older lessons. To be as specific as I can, the source of the problem is that our editing system uses javascript to edit other javascript. Errors are introduced when editors (reasonably) forget to escape single quotation marks when using a WYSIWYG editing interface.
We put time into polishing and editing older lessons on an ongoing basis. Right now this is being put into things that we believe give people the best value for our time: producing versions of the Fix for older lessons, etc. Our backend lesson production system goes through iterations and I’d like to add some safeguards against these sorts of “editing mistakes” in a future version.
If you’d like specific lessons/popups to be fixed, we can do that. Please let us know which lesson has the broken popup and we can fix it relatively quickly. Otherwise, the solution will have to wait until we transition to the next version of our lesson production system and port our lesson data over to the newer system.
Richard Sharpe Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 3:14 am
It seems like, ummm, an unusual decision to keep the content in one of the forms that it has to be rendered into, but there you go.
John B. Thanks for your reply. I assure you, compared to some of our customers, I am positively angelic.
trevelyan Says:
September 5th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
“Old Friend” is now updated… we’ll make a more systematic sweep for these popups the next time we update our lesson backend. In the meantime we’ll get this sort of thing fixed on a case by case basis.
>> It seems like, ummm, an unusual decision to keep the content in one of the forms that it has to be rendered into, but there you go.
It’s technically not the data-storage that’s the issue so much as the need for a browser-based editing interface. But I guess that’s another story. Thanks for the bug report, Richard.
Richard Sharpe Says:
September 6th, 2007 at 12:10 am
I’m thinking of a smallish Perl program that uses LWP to iterate through your pages, pulling the HTML down and checking all of the javascript elements for misplaced quotes etc.
I imagine that it could be done in a couple of hundred lines of Perl and could run under Linux or Windows. Nice little QA tool.