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A modular, interactive approach to active learning in Philosophy and Cognitive Science.
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How to use Inquiry
The site design and coding are done by Peter Bradley. The site is written
run by an Apache server, with php, PDFlib and MySQL. The modules, user
information, and questions are all served from the MySQL database. Whenever
possible, We have tried to accommodate all browsers and platforms. Unfortunately,
there are a couple of places in which Netscape 4.x will display poorly.
Netscape 4.x does not support DHTML 4.0, and there are simply too many
quirks and bugs in that generation of browser to accommodate everyone.
Mozilla is not a solution, as
communication between javascript and Macromedia Flash fails. The same
is true of Opera.
As a result, we have to recommend that site is best viewed in Internet
Explorer. IE is not perfect - as we note below, it fails when viewing
large PDF documents - but it is the most consistent. Below is a list
of those browsers we have tested the site with, and any problems we have
encountered.
Another option has recently surfaced: Mozilla's firefox.
Initial testing is promising and it's use is encouraged. You can
download it from: http://www.mozilla.org/
We are currently testing the site for accessibility.
The text portions of the modules are currently accessible and have
been tested with IBM's Home Page Reader 3.0. The interactive and animated
portions of the site are currently being tested with JAWS 5.0.
| Browser |
OS |
Tested |
Errors |
| Internet Explorer 6.0 |
Windows XP,
Mac |
07/14/2004 |
Menu System OK
When generating multi-page PDFs, the browser will, quite frequently,
show a blank page rather than the pdf doc. When the planets are
aligned just right, it works fine. The PDFs display correctly
in the other browsers. I've added a hyperlink to give the option
to save to disk as a work-around. |
| Mozilla Firefox 0.91 |
Windows XP |
07/14/2004 |
Menu System OK, if the user upgrades the flash player that ships with firefox. Go to: http://www.macromedia.com/ to do so. |
| Opera 7.52 |
Windows XP |
07/14/2004 |
Opera will not pass global variable through swliveconnect, probably because of the _global.* syntax. I eventually came up with a work around, so Opera is now usable.
No unusual errors. |
| Netscape 7.0 |
WIndows XP |
10/21/02 |
Menu is OK.
Occassionally will not load the start page, but in these conditions,
it won't load any page, so it's not my problem. |
| Netscape 6.2.3 |
WIndows XP |
10/21/02 |
Menu system fails to work because of
failure to support swliveconnect.
After
installing Flash 6 player, the browser will occasionally stop
displaying all graphics. The problem is not limited to our site,
but occurs on every site. Usually restarting netscape will fix
the problem. |
| Netscape 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 |
Windows XP |
10/21/02 |
Menu is OK.
Handles the CSS background tags differently. Affectst the
aesthetics, but not the usability, so it's ignored
Some of the CSS styles do not work within the modules. There
is no crucial issue here, but some of the formating will not
show. For example
the table of this page will have a red line on the top and bottom
in IE and NS6.
The flash movie on the intro page will not display if there
are any table tags nearby. Even when the table tags start after
the object tag. Odd. We still don't know what caused this, but
we worked around it by importing the 'example' style from the
module section, which we know displays embeded flash movies in
Netscape. |
| Netscape 4.5 |
Windows XP |
10/21/02 |
Menu system fails to work because of
failure to support swliveconnect. |
| Mozilla 1.0 |
Windows XP |
10/21/02 |
Menu system fails to work because of failure to support swliveconnect.
The scenario frame will show a small pink square for the empty
paragraph tag when there is no scenario. Not enough of a problem
to worry.
None encountered - but will crash from time to time for no apparent
reason. This occurs most frequently when Netscape is also running,
so it may be no fault of Mozilla's. |
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The site was developed using Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX, and tested
and validated with their tools. The flash documents contained throughout
the modules were written in Macromedia's Flash MX. Most are written
in Flash 6.0. Unfortunately, we cannot make these backwards compatible,
because we need to connect to the MySQL database from Flash, and the
functions required for doing so do not exist in previous versions of
Flash.
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