Docs:Wiki issues

This page contains information on, and discussion regarding, issues that have arisen as a result of the adoption of the development wiki as the primary course development platform. The issues may not necessarily be unique to the wiki, and could predate its adoption, but the wiki transition has highlighted them as trouble areas.

Applet support

While developing supporting tools for the wiki transition, and updating the course processor, it has become painfully obvious that the current state of applet support across multiple browsers while maintaining html compliance has become fraught with significant problems (even more than Flash animation support, and that is horrible enough).

At present, applet support is almost completely unnecessary (only one applet animation is present in all of APEcs' courses, and given advances in Flash this could now be remade and look far better). As of v3.7, applet support has been removed from HTMLOutputHandler.

Framework issues

In v3.7 of the course processor, the need to a user-visible framework has been completely removed. Output handlers that require a framework (at this point, the HTMLOutputHandler) need to merge any template-specific framework data into the processed material, but the data should come from the template directory not from any user-specified source.

Recent Changes and history

As part of the JISC OWB project, there have been requests made to allow uses to filter the Recent Changes and History pages according to group (ie: show changes made to pages by a given group). While the Recent Changes page has been modified to provide this facility, problems still remain:

• The history page may not be filterable in any sane fashion. While it may be possible to provide tools to filter the history by group, so that the page only shows changes made by a given group, attempting to use the page to obtain results may simply result in junk: the problem is that the history page tools allow you to compare changes between two versions of a page, and if we filter the page the behaviour will not be what people expect. For example, say that there are two users, one in group A and another in group B. Person A edits the page, person B edits it twice, and then A comes along again and makes an edit. If we filter the page so that it only shows changes made by group A, if we attempt to compare the two visible history steps (the two edits by A) then what we actually see in the diff result is the last change made by A and the two changes made by B, with no way to tell who was responsible for which change. Indeed, there'd be no indication that B had made changes other than "2 intermediate changes not shown" displayed at the top of the page. This is a serious issue that will need discussion.