Technical Requirements for the Chicago Homer and Known Issues

The Chicago Homer has been developed in compliance with W3C standards for HTML 4.0, Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1. See http://w3c.org for details. It has been tested and found to work well with

1. Windows NT, 2000, or XP with IE5
2. Macintosh OS X with Safari
3. Netscape 7.1 or Mozilla 1.3 and later with either Windows or Macintosh OS X

The Chicago Homer does not work at all with Netscape Communicator, and it does not work dependably with newer versions of Netscape prior to 7.1. Specific problems about other operating system+browser combinations are discussed below.

The Chicago Homer will display Greek properly with any Unicode font that supports precombined characters in the extended Greek character set, such as Palatino Linotype or Arial Unicode MS on the Windows side or the Helvetica font that is built into OS X.

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Topics addressed:

1. General performance issues
2. Windows 95 and 98 with Internet Explorer
3. The Macintosh with Internet Explorer 5.0

General Performance Issues

The response time to a particular search on the Chicago Homer depends on several factors:

1. The complexity of the search that is executed on the server
2. The load imposed on the server by concurrent users
3. The speed of network traffic
4. The speed of your particular network connection (modem, cable, DSL, ethernet)

The speed of your network connection makes a big difference in the time it takes for the application to load. If you use a modem, you will find that the application loads slowly initially. A modem connection, however, does not make much difference to the speed with which the application retrieves searches of average size and complexity. You will, however, find it useful not to exceed the default setting of thirty browse lines per screen.

Some kinds of searches impose a considerable load on the server and take much longer to execute. This is particularly true of searches that specify line ranges. Search time is different than the time it takes to deliver results: some searches execute very fast, but if they retrieve a long list, it may take time to deliver the results.

Windows 95 and Windows 98 with Internet Explorer

The Chicago Homer works well under Windows 95 and its descendents as long as you do not open an application that goes to the network, such as e-mail or ftp. If you do, you may experience conflicts between the browser and the other network application. Typically, you will notice that in executing a search, some parts of the current layer do not clear when a new layer moves to the top. There are several ways of dealing with this "show-through." Sometimes, moving the scroll bar will fix the problems. At other times, you need to clear out your temporary internet files (in Internet Explorer, this can be done by selecting Internet Options under the Tools menu, where there's an option to delete these files), close the browser, and open it again. Sometimes you need to restart Windows.

The Macintosh with Internet Explorer 5.0

If you have OS X, you should install the Safari browser or Mozilla 1.3. Both work much better with The Chicago Homer. Most features of the Chicago Homer work in a stable way on a Macintosh with OS 8.5 or higher, but three features do not:

1. If you click on a word in the text in browse mode, the report in the margin will typically come up only partially. Jiggling the scroll bar will force the application to redraw the screen and display the margin report properly. .
2. Clicking on a repetition on the repetitions page will normally produce a little popup window with citations from which you can go to the individual passages. Depending on your version of the operating system, one of the following things will happen:
   
   1. The Java pop-up window appears, but the links are dead. Sometimes, jiggling the scrollbar will activate the links.
   2. The pop-up window does not appear at first, but jiggling the scrollbar will make it show. If that happens, the links usually work as well.
3. Unicode display of the extended Greek character set does not work with the Macintosh and IE 5, and you are for all practical purposes restricted to the use of Greek in transliteration. OS 9 in theory has limited, and OS X has full, support for Unicode. But in practice we have been unable to display Greek under IE 5 on the Mac even if it ran OS X and had a font that worked with Safari or Mozilla 1.3. For an introduction to and advice on Greek Unicode display, consult the Unicode page of the Stoa Consortium.