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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