Bizarre, Frustrating Browser-Specific Behavior?
I have been using Zope part-time now for almost a year. I've built some simple stuff and some moderately complex stuff. Over that time, I've kept notes about things I didn't understand, deleting those notes as I've learned more (mostly from this list). But now I'm just at a point where I have to make a decision whether to make a *big* commitment to Zope over the next year or so on behalf of my two biggest clients and I'm experiencing some weirdness that gives me a bit of pause. I'm really looking here for an indication whether these are things others have encountered as well or whether there might be something I'm either doing wrong or not understanding. 1. Working in IE5 on Macintosh OS X, I often encounter what look for all the world like corrupted or scrambled files. Python Script objects appear particularly vulnerable, but I've seen this with DTML docs and methods as well. The symptom is that some number of letters at the beginning of the file appear to be replaced by stray and often unprintable characters. When this happens, the rest of the file becomes scrambled and sometimes unreadable, always cut off before it ends. I can switch to Windows at that point, e.g., and open the same file, and all looks normal. 2. Working in Netscape 6 and/or Mozilla 1.0 on Win2K, I had the same thing happen twice tonight. I edit a PythonScript object, Save Changes, get an error, click the "Back" button, and I'm on the page where that script is supposed to exist but the editing area is completely blank. Browser refresh does nothing. I lose the work. 3. Only annoying, but in IE5 on Win2K, the object editing area in the ZMI is too wide for the space and cannot be adjusted using the "Narrower" button to come within range. Result: a significant amount of horizontal scrolling. I'm running Zope 2.3.3 against Python 1.5 on my ISP-hosted Zope sites. I would upgrade to 2.5 (which is available on my ISP) now that I'm no longer using Squishdot for discussions, but I've not read anything here that indicates such a change would have any impact on these issues. So is *anyone* else running into this kind of bizarre behavior? I have lost substantial productive time both tracking and dealing with these and other issues over the past few months. Zope is still faster and better than anything else I've used but I am loath to risk my clients' time and money on it if the substrate is still as quirky as my experience would *seem* to indicate it may be. Dan Shafer, Chief Scribe and Tablet Keeper PythonCard Open Source Project http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net
Am 24.07.2002, 06:28 Uhr schrub Dan Shafer <pydan@danshafer.com>:
So is *anyone* else running into this kind of bizarre behavior?
We had some trouble recently with Opera 6.0x (on Linux and Windows) cutting of large <textarea>-content and inserting seemingly random binary chars at the end, mostly after heavy editing sessions. It never happened with any other browser and we're using quite a few (IE5.x, IE6, NS4.7x, NS6.x, NS7, Mozilla1, w3m) on a regular basis. It never happened via https, only via http. And yes, we lost a fair amount of work to this phenomenon, too. Jo. -- Internetmanufaktur Jo Meder ---------------------- Berlin, Germany http://www.meder.de/ ------------------- fon: ++49-30-417 17 63 33 Kollwitzstr. 75 ------------------------ fax: ++49-30-417 17 63 45 10435 Berlin --------------------------- mob: ++49-170- 2 98 89 97 Public GnuPG-Key ---------- http://www.meder.de/keys/jo-pubkey.txt
3. Only annoying, but in IE5 on Win2K, the object editing area in the ZMI is too wide for the space and cannot be adjusted using the "Narrower" button to come within range.
I see this in IE6/Win2K - although it's only slightly too large. Definitely the Narrower and Wider buttons don't work (but Taller and Shorter do). I work around it by using ExternalEditor for almost everything. I haven't experienced any of your other woes though, and have spent the better part of the last month inside Zope (2.5.1). Sounds frustrating indeed. In older versions of Zope I would occasionally experience IE crashes which I haven't seen repeated in 2.5.1, so maybe set up a testbed and see what happens. Julian.
[Julian Melville]
3. Only annoying, but in IE5 on Win2K, the object editing area in the ZMI is too wide for the space and cannot be adjusted using the "Narrower" button to come within range.
I see this in IE6/Win2K - although it's only slightly too large. Definitely the Narrower and Wider buttons don't work (but Taller and Shorter do). I work around it by using ExternalEditor for almost everything.
I haven't experienced any of your other woes though, and have spent the better part of the last month inside Zope (2.5.1). Sounds frustrating indeed.
In older versions of Zope I would occasionally experience IE crashes which I haven't seen repeated in 2.5.1, so maybe set up a testbed and see what happens.
I have never seen the data garble/loss problem using Zope 2.3.3 on Win2000 using IE5.5, IE6, or Mozilla 1.0. I just checked and found that the wider/narrower buttons do not work with either Moz or IE on my machine but it is rather academic because when I resize the browser window the textarea resizes to fit, so the scroll bars stay in place. As for IE crashes, I have had a lot more of these since the last few upgrades to 5.5, and since the advent of 6, but nothing related to Zope. Unfortunately, this does not help those who are having problems. I wonder if they suffer from the effects of DLL rot (related to DLL hell). That is, too many installs have pushed their own versions of certain DLLs, leaving a system whose parts do not all play together well anymore. I say that because, since I had to completely reinstall Windows, I stopped having IE and Word crashes. Cheers, Tom P
Dan Shafer wrote:
2. Working in Netscape 6 and/or Mozilla 1.0 on Win2K, I had the same thing happen twice tonight. I edit a PythonScript object, Save Changes, get an error, click the "Back" button, and I'm on the page where that script is supposed to exist but the editing area is completely blank. Browser refresh does nothing. I lose the work.
hmm I have used almost any version of IE from 4.0 and betas of Mozilla from 0.6 up until 1.0 and I have never experienced that bogus/erroneous text fields are posted. I mostly work with structured text though. And here you are experiencing it on several platforms. Could it be that some of the text you are pasting is tripping up a parser somewhere ?? What kind of content are you editing in the text fields?? The only time I have experienced something similar is when I have mistakenly submitted a form via GET instead of POST and hitting the (approximate) limit of 1024 character in the form. regards Max M -- "Sorry I would Really Like To Help More On This Project, But Am To Busy Doing Paid Work On A Tight Deadline" Max M
Dan Shafer wrote:
2. Working in Netscape 6 and/or Mozilla 1.0 on Win2K, I had the same thing happen twice tonight. I edit a PythonScript object, Save Changes, get an error, click the "Back" button, and I'm on the page where that script is supposed to exist but the editing area is completely blank. Browser refresh does nothing. I lose the work.
Ah ok I see that you are having the problem with Python scripts, doh! Perhaps it is a data transmission problem? Your data being garbled somewhere on the way to your isp? These kind of problems are _not_ normal. Or else it would be all over the mailing list I assure you. - You should look at the common factors you have between your machines. Are they on the same network/moden/adsl line this could be the cause of the problem. - Are you using different machines on different locations, the problem is most likely at your isp. regards Max M -- "Sorry I would Really Like To Help More On This Project, But Am To Busy Doing Paid Work On A Tight Deadline" Max M
At 9:28 PM -0700 7/23/02, Dan Shafer wrote:
I have been using Zope part-time now for almost a year. I've built some simple stuff and some moderately complex stuff. Over that time, I've kept notes about things I didn't understand, deleting those notes as I've learned more (mostly from this list).
But now I'm just at a point where I have to make a decision whether to make a *big* commitment to Zope over the next year or so on behalf of my two biggest clients and I'm experiencing some weirdness that gives me a bit of pause. I'm really looking here for an indication whether these are things others have encountered as well or whether there might be something I'm either doing wrong or not understanding.
1. Working in IE5 on Macintosh OS X, I often encounter what look for all the world like corrupted or scrambled files. Python Script objects appear particularly vulnerable, but I've seen this with DTML docs and methods as well. The symptom is that some number of letters at the beginning of the file appear to be replaced by stray and often unprintable characters. When this happens, the rest of the file becomes scrambled and sometimes unreadable, always cut off before it ends. I can switch to Windows at that point, e.g., and open the same file, and all looks normal.
Editing anything in a browser sucks. Get BBEdit: It doesn't suck. I know it costs money, but man is it worth it. - rmgw <http://www.trustedmedianetworks.com/> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Wesley Trusted Media Networks, Inc. "...if you can't get out, you just either blow something up, or you eat something, or you just throw penguins in the air." - Brian Henson
OK, I think I get two messages from all the helpful replies here. Thanks again, as always, for the help, list! First, editing stuff directly in the browser interface to ZMI is not as good an idea as I had always thought. That's too bad because it adds another level of seams to my development environment, but I will try taking the advice of going to an external editor for all my non-trivial Zope document editing and see if things improve. Second, I'm upgrading my Zope instance to 2.5.x. I had stayed with the original installation I had at my ISP of 2.3.3 because I was using Squishdot for community stuff and it wouldn't run on 2.4 and later, at least not reliably from what I gathered. But I'm using Zwikis for discussion now and no longer need to support Squishdot, so I'll upgrade and see if the problems are reduced. Thanks again. This list is one of the big reasons I am reluctant to move away from Zope, an environment that I truly love 90% of the time! At 08:08 AM 7/24/2002 -0700, Richard Wesley wrote:
At 9:28 PM -0700 7/23/02, Dan Shafer wrote:
I have been using Zope part-time now for almost a year. I've built some simple stuff and some moderately complex stuff. Over that time, I've kept notes about things I didn't understand, deleting those notes as I've learned more (mostly from this list).
But now I'm just at a point where I have to make a decision whether to make a *big* commitment to Zope over the next year or so on behalf of my two biggest clients and I'm experiencing some weirdness that gives me a bit of pause. I'm really looking here for an indication whether these are things others have encountered as well or whether there might be something I'm either doing wrong or not understanding.
1. Working in IE5 on Macintosh OS X, I often encounter what look for all the world like corrupted or scrambled files. Python Script objects appear particularly vulnerable, but I've seen this with DTML docs and methods as well. The symptom is that some number of letters at the beginning of the file appear to be replaced by stray and often unprintable characters. When this happens, the rest of the file becomes scrambled and sometimes unreadable, always cut off before it ends. I can switch to Windows at that point, e.g., and open the same file, and all looks normal.
Editing anything in a browser sucks. Get BBEdit: It doesn't suck.
I know it costs money, but man is it worth it.
- rmgw
<http://www.trustedmedianetworks.com/>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Wesley Trusted Media Networks, Inc.
"...if you can't get out, you just either blow something up, or you eat something, or you just throw penguins in the air." - Brian Henson
Dan Shafer, Chief Scribe and Tablet Keeper PythonCard Open Source Project http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net
On Wed, 2002-07-24 at 11:31, Dan Shafer wrote: <snip>
Second, I'm upgrading my Zope instance to 2.5.x. I had stayed with the original installation I had at my ISP of 2.3.3 because I was using Squishdot for community stuff and it wouldn't run on 2.4 and later, at least not reliably from what I gathered. But I'm using Zwikis for discussion now and no longer need to support Squishdot, so I'll upgrade and see if the problems are reduced. <snip>
Unimportant for you if you're using something else, but I'm running a few Squishdot instances in vhosts on 2.5.1 with zero problems. -- Jack Coates Monkeynoodle: A Scientific Venture...
1. Working in IE5 on Macintosh OS X, I often encounter what look for all
I've not seen this. But I so rarely use a mac. From your description it's clear that nothing is being permanenlty messed up. This leads me to believe this is a client side issue.
2. Working in Netscape 6 and/or Mozilla 1.0 on Win2K, I had the
This happens frequently and has to do with cacheing, or a lack there of. I've noticed this alot on IE on the windows platform. I've grown acustomed to ctrl-a ctrl-c before submitting an edit.
3. Only annoying, but in IE5 on Win2K, the object editing area in the ZMI is too wide for the space and cannot be adjusted using the "Narrower" button to come within range. Result: a significant amount of horizontal scrolling.
This can be fixed. It's poorly written style in the dtml for the zmi. I usually edit the appropriate files upon an upgrade of zope. ZC has claimed to fix this at least once, but they still have it wrong. One wonders if they use IE at all there....
I'm running Zope 2.3.3 against Python 1.5 on my ISP-hosted Zope sites. I would upgrade to 2.5 (which is available on my ISP) now that I'm no longer using Squishdot for discussions, but I've not read anything here that indicates such a change would have any impact on these issues.
2.5 is FAR more stable than 2.3.3 in my experience.
[Steve Drees]
1. Working in IE5 on Macintosh OS X, I often encounter what look for all
I've not seen this. But I so rarely use a mac. From your description it's clear that nothing is being permanenlty messed up. This leads me to believe this is a client side issue.
2. Working in Netscape 6 and/or Mozilla 1.0 on Win2K, I had the
This happens frequently and has to do with cacheing, or a lack there of. I've noticed this alot on IE on the windows platform. I've grown acustomed to ctrl-a ctrl-c before submitting an edit.
If it is about caching, with IE on Windows you can set the caching to "Check for newer versions of pages Automatically" (this is what I am using with no troubles), or on "every visit to the page". On Mozilla, I have it set to "When the page is out of date", and so far have not had any problems. Cheers, Tom P
participants (8)
-
Dan Shafer -
Jack Coates -
Jo Meder -
Julian Melville -
Max M -
Richard Wesley -
Steve Drees -
Thomas B. Passin