PDA

View Full Version : Java client sorta-bug a few days ago


Seidl
02-14-2001, 09:55 AM
Some of you using the java client a few days ago probably notices that quotation marks, less-thans, greater-thans and ampersands all were looking ... funny. Let me explain.

The server was going through an upgrade to send these characters as html instead of as plain text. This is in the long run a good thing, as the more html the server sends and the clients understand, the easier it will be to do things like server-side config files, who's in the room lists, etc.

The problem was that netscape caches things locally. So, instead of you getting the new client that could understand the html for these symboles, you got the old one that netscape had helpfully saved for you. And since the older version didn't know how to handle these special things, so saw all the goop.

Everyone should be seeing things right now, as the caches should have expired. Hopefully we can avoid bugs like this in the future but ... the joys of a beta. http://www.skotos.net/ubb/smile.gif You may also see some new features in the text processing coming soon, but I don't have all the details on that yet.

-=- Matt

Atama
02-14-2001, 10:04 AM
Hehe, for those of us who use IE, we saw those things too... When our Java-using neighbors were talking. http://www.skotos.net/ubb/wink.gif

Zell
02-14-2001, 11:22 PM
Originally posted by Seidl:
Some of you using the java client a few days ago probably notices that quotation marks, less-thans, greater-thans and ampersands all were looking ... funny. Let me explain.

And thanks to Matt for explaining. Indeed, we had to start sending some rather ungainly control sequences to prevent people from sending HTML to each other -- a cool feature that was a little too easy to abuse to be allowed to run rampant. As a part of this change, we put some new code into the Java client (to which Matt has made lots of much admired upgrades) to -handle- those bits...

... but yes, Netscape's applet cache leaves something to be desired, and so many of you were exposed to the trauma of HTML internals for a couple of hours.

Apologies.

Zell