Concordance: latest news
2007-8: Concordance and Windows Vista
Concordance has now had some testing with Windows Vista. It installs and runs without major problems. At present there are two known issues:
1. To use the context-sensitive Concordance Help system on your Windows Vista computer, you'll need to download the WinHelp viewer from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6ebcfad9-d3f5-4365-8070-334cd175d4bb&displaylang=en
Your PC will need to pass the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' validation. The size of the download is a little over 600 kB. It works on both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista. You have to download it yourself from Microsoft as they prohibit its distribution except via their own website.
As an alternative, all the pages from the Concordance help system are available here on the website, for reading online or downloading to your own computer.
2. Windows Vista comes with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, and so the issue described below applies to Web Concordances that you make on Vista.
A minor update to Concordance is planned for later in 2008 that will, it is hoped, address both of these issues. Assuming no major problems are yet to be discovered, Concordance will then be fully supported on Windows Vista. All updates to Concordance are free of charge to registered users for the foreseeable future.
December 2006: Web Concordances and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
(updated February 2007)
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, released in late 2006, does not work correctly with existing Web Concordances made with Concordance.
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 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 is not compatible with existing Web Concordances.
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.
When possible, I plan to release an update to Concordance so that newly-made Web Concordances will be compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. 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 above, moving 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
