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Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

July 19, 2006

MovableType 3.31

Against my better judgement, I decided to go ahead and upgrade the blogs here on golem to MovableType 3.31.

You’ll recall that previous versions of the MovableType Administrative Interface did not come close to being well-formed XHTML. Out-of-the box, it was completely non-functional, when served as application/xhtml+xml. Considerable effort was required to fix MT 3.1x. I skipped MT 3.2, because it didn’t seem worth the effort to fix.

But, for whatever reason, I decided to go ahead and install 3.31. Some of the problems I’d reported previously were fixed, but the busy beavers at SixApart introduced an equal number of new ones . My 1682 line patch file for MT 3.31 is almost exclusively devoted1 to fixing it to work under application/xhtml+xml.

The OpenPGPComment plugin needed a small tweak

@@ -104,7 +105,7 @@
            or return $ctx->_no_comment_error('MT' . $tag);
        my $blog = $ctx->stash('blog');
        my $comment_text = defined $comment->text ? $comment->text : '';
-       $comment_text = MT::Template::Context::munge_comment($comment_text, $blog);
+       $comment_text = MT::Util::munge_comment($comment_text, $blog);
        my $comment_id=$comment->id;
        my $comment_author=$comment->author;
        my $comment_date=MT::Util::format_ts("%H:%M %m/%d/%Y",$comment->created_on);

to get it to work under MT 3.31. A couple of other plugins needed to be updated2. But, generally, aside from MT itself, the update went smoothly.

Anyway, if you encounter any weirdnesses or yellow screens-of-death, report them here. I’m sure that the final size of my patch file will be a good bit bigger than 1682 lines.

Update (7/20/2006):

One weirdness is that Technorati and Feeds.app plugins (used on my sidebar) now seem to spit out utf-8, despite the fact that my PublishCharset is iso-8859-1. So my sidebar is now not well-formed3. Grrrr….

Update (7/20/2006):

The Commenting and Search issues seem to be fixed now.

Update (7/22/2006):

I seem to have successfully nailed the problems with the Technorati and Feeds.app plugins. Umh …, well, modulo the fact that Feeds.app spooges Atom feeds containing type="xhtml". But that’s a subject for a different post.

Update (7/23/2006):

Another annoyance is the new built-in spam-fighting facilities. MT 3.2 rolled a version of spamlookup into the default installation. Unfortunately, unlike Brad Choate’s version, the designers of MT’s version of spamlookup did not put much stock in the notion that one might wish to assign very different weights to the criteria for filtering trackbacks versus those for filtering comments. So I was faced with the choice of either allowing a flood of spam trackbacks, or having some — perfectly legitimate — comments flagged as spam. Fortunately the spam-fighting API is pluggable, and I am slowly trying to re-establish the status quo ante. Apologies to those whose comments were (temporarily) blocked.

1 A mere 316 lines are devoted to adding features; I haven’t put any thought yet into whether some of those modifications can now be replaced by plugins.

2 At least on my installation, the SimpleComments 1.33 plugin needed some further tinkering to work with MT 3.31. If you can’t wait for an official update, let me know.

3 Fortunately for me, that’s the one class of well-formedness errors that XHTML User Agents seem to tolerate.

Posted by distler at July 19, 2006 7:19 PM

TrackBack URL for this Entry:   https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/dxy-tb.fcgi/877

6 Comments & 1 Trackback

Testing …

Just a test of the comment system.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on July 20, 2006 10:44 AM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Re: MovableType 3.31

Actually, it is well formed. It just isn’t the characters you expect.

The charaset for iso-8859-1 contains 256 code points. They correspond to the first 256 Unicode characters positions. And cover every possible value a byte may have.

The only invalid XML characters in the iso-8859-1 character set all have the same encoding in both iso-8859-1 and utf-8.

Posted by: Sam Ruby on July 20, 2006 11:32 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Merely Invalid?

Actually, it is well formed.

Merely invalid?

Cold comfort …

Fortunately, the breakage seems to be confined to the sidebar (and those two plugins?).

Compared to the other problems with MT 3.31, this seems like small beer.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on July 20, 2006 11:50 AM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Re: Merely Invalid?

“non SGML character” is a new one on me. Learn something new every day. I do quibble with the message in that 9, 10, and 13 are valid.

You might see some improvement if you were to do the following:
utf8::decode($string) if utf8::valid($string);

Posted by: Sam Ruby on July 20, 2006 12:21 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: MovableType 3.31

Are you using your trackback internationalization code or the default MT 3.31 code (with no_utf8 commented of course)?

Posted by: Zack on July 25, 2006 10:39 PM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this

Trackback I18N code

Using mine (as you might detect by examining the patch file).

I have received a bunch of (non-spam) trackbacks since then, and it seems to be working fine. But I have not torture-tested it under MT 3.31 yet.

Posted by: Jacques Distler on July 26, 2006 1:15 AM | Permalink | PGP Sig | Reply to this
Read the post MathML in HTML5
Weblog: Musings
Excerpt: Roger Sidje tries something new...
Tracked: October 3, 2006 10:01 AM

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