Concordance: latest news
July 2009: Concordance 3.3 released
Concordance 3.3 is now released. It is fully supported and tested on Windows Vista and tested without problems on Windows 7 Release Candidate (due to be released by Microsoft later in 2009). Web Concordances made with Concordance 3.3 are fully compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and 8.
As usual, upgrades to the latest version are free to registered users.
Older news [updated July 2009]: Web Concordances and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8 do not work correctly with existing Web Concordances made with Concordance 3.2 and earlier versions.
If you have used Concordance to make Web Concordances (i.e. a collection of linked HTML files) and have published them on the Web, you will find that visitors to your website who have 'upgraded' their web browser to Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or 8 will not see what you intended. When they click on a word in the Wordlist in the left frame, the references are displayed in the same frame, rather than in the frames to the right. In short, the handling of frames in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 is not compatible with existing Web Concordances.
To solve this problem, you can re-make your Web Concordance with Concordance 3.3 (released July 2009). However, if you have invested effort in making specially-tailored Web Concordances of your own, you may not wish to re-create them from scratch. In this case your best option is to edit your existing HTML files as described below.
Detailed description and solution:
The problem lies in the fact that HTML itself has evolved and become stricter since Concordance was designed, and it seems that in IE7 Microsoft have finally decided to conform to some strict new HTML standards.
Specifically, the HTML construct <base target ="something"> (where "something" will be an actual name) is no longer allowed outside the HEAD section of an HTML document, and so it must be moved inside the HEAD.
Web Concordances have a sequence of files named h1.htm, h2.htm, h3.htm etc. that contain the content for the headword frame and c1.htm, c2.htm, c3.htm etc. for the content of the concordance frame. In each of the "h" files, a few lines from the top, is a line like this: <base target="theconc"> . This line also appears in the files called c_a-z.htm and h-all.htm. In the "c" files (c1.htm, c2.htm, etc.) the line is <base target="thetext"> . In all cases these lines appear a few lines after the HTML tag </HEAD>. To fix the problem, they have to be moved upwards so they reside within the HEAD of the document instead of outside and below it -- that is, they must be moved to a position anywhere after the tag <HEAD> but before the tag </HEAD>. Finally, there is the single file called h_a-z.htm. This contains the expression <base target="thelinks">. That too must be moved before the </HEAD> tag.
If in doubt, look at the HTML source for any of The Web Concordances, which have been updated to work with IE7.
To sum up: move the line that specifies the <base target...> to a position within the document's <HEAD>.
If your Web Concordance consists of a large number of HTML files, they may be a tedious chore to edit manually. I'd recommend the use of a text editor that can apply the same changes to many files at once. One such editor is MED, available at http://www.utopia-planitia.de/indexus.html . With this, you can update a large Web Concordance in a few moments. I'd recommend you take a full backup of your Web Concordance files before starting to experiment!
Comments or questions: R.J.C.Watt
