Return to FAQ.txt CVS log

Up to [Repository] / kupuMPIWG / doc

Annotation of kupuMPIWG/doc/FAQ.txt, revision 1.1

1.1     ! dwinter     1: ===============================
        !             2: Kupu Frequently Asked Questions
        !             3: ===============================
        !             4: 
        !             5: * Will this work with Safari or Opera or ...?
        !             6: 
        !             7:   No, Kupu will only run on browsers with the IE engine (IE 5.5+) or those
        !             8:   with a Gecko engine (Mozilla 1.3.1+ and Netscape 7.1+), not on the 
        !             9:   Konqueror one (which Safari uses) or on Opera or any other browser. 
        !            10:   Actually Mozilla copied a feature unique to Internet Explorer, which is 
        !            11:   not part of any standard, which Kupu uses. Because it's not part of a
        !            12:   standard, it is not very likely any other browsers will implement it,
        !            13:   although we keep hoping some day they will.
        !            14: 
        !            15: * Kupu allows users to do all kinds of things - like coloring text -
        !            16:   that I don't want in my system.
        !            17: 
        !            18:   All of the kupu style functions can be turned on and off using CSS or in 
        !            19:   the configuration. Additionally, the element controls can be extended to
        !            20:   accomodate special needs of your content.
        !            21: 
        !            22: * Is my platform supported?
        !            23: 
        !            24:   It probably is: Kupu has requirements on the client side, but works with
        !            25:   just about any web server. As long as your server supports POST and some
        !            26:   server-side scripting language or CGI (to process form variables if Kupu
        !            27:   is part of a form) or HTTP PUT you can install Kupu on your website or
        !            28:   application.
        !            29: 
        !            30: * Why do I get all kinds of weird characters?
        !            31: 
        !            32:   Kupu seems to work correctly when you use UTF-8 as the character set for
        !            33:   encoding, but gives unpredictable results when you use another one such
        !            34:   as latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). Make sure to always use UTF-8 as the character
        !            35:   set for incoming data and set the correct Content-Type header or meta-tag,
        !            36:   and Kupu will send back UTF-8 data.
        !            37: 
        !            38: * Saving seems to work, but my browser keeps showing old stuff
        !            39: 
        !            40:   Browsers tend to store web pages a while to reduce the amount of data that
        !            41:   has to be transferred. Obviously this can get in the way when using Kupu,
        !            42:   so the browsers need to be told not to store (cache) the Kupu iframe contents
        !            43:   on retrieval. This can be done either with HTTP headers or with meta-tags.
        !            44:   For an example of which meta-tags to use, see fulldoc.html (the example
        !            45:   content page).
        !            46: 
        !            47: * What's this '1223' status code I see in the code?
        !            48: 
        !            49:   There seems to be a bug in Internet Explorer that in some cases it says that
        !            50:   the status code of a save action is '1223' (a code that doesn't exist in
        !            51:   HTTP, it's not described in the specs and there seems to be no information
        !            52:   about this on the web). Since it looks like this code is only returned on a
        !            53:   succeeding save action, it seems that reasonable safe work-around is to add
        !            54:   the status code as one of the allowed codes in common/kupueditor.js (search
        !            55:   for '204' and you'll find a line that checks if the status code is either 200
        !            56:   or 204, add 1223 there). This is what we've done, however, if you find 
        !            57:   something can go wrong with that workaround, please let us know.
        !            58:   
        !            59: * Does Kupu produce valid XHTML?
        !            60: 
        !            61:   Well... Kupu produces *well-formed XML*, which out-of-the-box does not 
        !            62:   contain any elements that aren't allowed in XHTML anymore, and are written 
        !            63:   in a form compliant to the XHTML notation (lowercase tag and attribute 
        !            64:   names, attributes all have values and all values are in quotes) but it is
        !            65:   theoretically possible to create constructions that are not valid according
        !            66:   to the XHTML DTD. For most cases, however, the data produced by Kupu is
        !            67:   perfectly usable, even after copied from another website or notorious Word.
        !            68: 
        !            69: * What about i18n?
        !            70: 
        !            71:   Currently Kupu is not adapted to i18n. The plan is to write i18n support for
        !            72:   the JavaScript sources in one of the next versions (probably using XML 
        !            73:   inside the HTML, a technique sometimes called 'XML data islands', to store 
        !            74:   all the JavaScript strings) but currently it's not possible to convert the 
        !            75:   JavaScript strings on the server without having to hack in the sources.
        !            76:   Current technologies make it hard to handle i18n in a clean way on the 
        !            77:   client, so therefore Kupu will at first choose to let the server take care 
        !            78:   of it. Since Kupu is not dependent on a specific server, however, we can not 
        !            79:   guarantee that support for your server will be available even in the future, 
        !            80:   but we will at least provide infrastructure and probably also dictionaries 
        !            81:   for different languages.
        !            82: 
        !            83: * What about Bitflux, Xopus, and others?
        !            84: 
        !            85:   The authors of these editors have done great work. They are superb
        !            86:   applications, but the major drawback is they work in only one browser (as of 
        !            87:   this writing). Kupu was created to work in both Mozilla/Netscape and Internet 
        !            88:   Explorer.
        !            89: 
        !            90: * What's with the xsltproc error when 'make'ing kupu?
        !            91: 
        !            92:   xsltproc wants to load external entities references in the XML
        !            93:   files, such as DTDs. External entities that are referenced by URIs
        !            94:   are typically loaded when you have a network
        !            95:   connection. Alternatively, you can install the DTD on your harddrive
        !            96:   and point xsltproc to an XML catalog that resolves the URIs to local
        !            97:   harddrive directories.
        !            98: 
        !            99:   Most users that generate the kupu macros probably don't have the
        !           100:   DTDs installed on their harddrive. When they invoke xsltproc, it
        !           101:   will load them from the net. If you don't have an internet
        !           102:   connection, you'll see the above error.
        !           103: 
        !           104:   To stop xsltproc from getting resources from the net (because it is
        !           105:   time consuming and unnecessary), we pass it the --nonet switch. A
        !           106:   bug (?) in xsltproc makes it then complain about not being able to
        !           107:   load entities from the net--but that's exactly what we want to
        !           108:   achieve! So, this error message is not an error message for us--it
        !           109:   is the contrary!
        !           110: 
        !           111: Other questions
        !           112: ---------------
        !           113: Additional questions for the FAQ are welcome. Please post them on:
        !           114: kupu-dev@codespeak.net