Vector on the Web

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 16

At long last, Vector now has its own web site at http://www.vector.org.uk. This site is provided to supplement Vector, and is not to meant to replace it. For the rest of this article I will call the web site "vector.org" and the journal "Vector".

Currently vector.org contains a full back index to Vector vols. 1-12, a revamped product guide (see later), BAA membership details, details of the current BAA committee and sustaining members (in fact almost the whole contents of Vector’s inside and outside front and back covers), links to other APL-related sites, information about the latest volume (including contents pages) and some articles from recent editions. Additionally, vector.org also has some APL workspaces which contain material published in Vector ready for downloading.

APL Characters on the Web¶

There is, at present, no standard method of specifying the symbol set of characters being used in web pages except in respect of language. (Note that language here explicitly EXCLUDES computer languages.) By default, the Latin1 symbol set is assumed.

I have tried several approaches to the problem of putting APL characters up on web pages. (Note that HTML uses 8-bit characters not the 7-bit characters that email and news groups support. So the problem is not so much sending the characters, but selecting the correct symbol set to display them.)

The idea of putting up "gifs" (images) of individual APL characters is not practicable, although a gif of a function can work quite well. However, trying to cut APL characters from a gif and pasting them into an APL workspace might not have the desired effect! It is also quite expensive in space, slow to download, and will not work on a "text only browser".

Use of Jim Weigang’s APL/ASCII transliteration could work very well, but would not win any prizes for visual elegance, and might well put off the APL novice. It is however very transportable across machines, interpreters and web browsers, and with the appropriate (as yet unwritten) browser "applet", could be converted and displayed in the correct font.

Use of third party software (such as Acrobat PDF) works quite well, but only for those with the correct software installed. (Adrian Smith has put up APL articles in the past in this form.)

The best we have come up with is to put in any APL characters tagged as requiring a "fixed pitch font" and setting the mono-spaced font in the browser to an appropriate APL font. Note that because of the way Netscape detects mono-spaced fonts, the currently available Truetype fonts from Dyalog and Vector cannot be used by versions 2 or 3 of Netscape browsers. The APL fonts from APL*PLUS and APL2000 are OK. Adrian hopes to make his APL2741 available soon as a proper mono-spaced Truetype font.

Not only can the text displayed in this way be viewed as APL (with just a minor modification to the set-up of most (PC) web browsers), but the text may be cut from the browser and then pasted into the appropriate APL WS. This can work successfully even if the browser is not using the correct font.

Perhaps a 3-part combined solution might be the best compromise: put the APL text up (tagged as requiring a mono-spaced font), with links to a second page which has the APL/ASCII transliteration, and a third page with a gif of the APL text.

Feedback and suggestions in this area are welcome.

Product Guide¶

I am attempting to put the information currently available from the Vector Product Guide up into vector.org in a useful (and maintainable) manner. I am transferring the contents of the current product guide from a Word document into a series of Windows INI files from whence I am automatically generating the on-line vector.org Product Guide.

Each company or organisation will end up with a vector.org web page of its own. Each page will contain the contact details of the company (complete with working email and www links to the company, if available), followed by a list of each product the company offers in Vector. Each page is supplemented with its own "hit" counter, and date of last update.

Soon I hope to offer a "Vector Product Guide Input Form" from vector.org which will allow existing (and future) product guide contributors a simple method of supplying the Vector production team with their latest "copy".

The BAA hopes to be able to offer its product guide contributors extra web space, where we can put up any additional web pages the contributors wish to supply for a nominal fee. Final details have not yet been decided, but prices will be about an order of magnitude less than the Vector Advertising rates. Current suggestions are for a flat fee of say £10 every time the page(s) is(are) updated, plus a £10 fee per page per Vector edition (3 months). Thus a page being updated once a year would cost £50, while 3 pages updated 6 times in a year would cost £180. Monies raised by the sale of extra web space would be used to help cover the costs incurred in providing vector.org.

Note: the standard product guide entry (both in Vector and vector.org) will continue to be free of any charge.