[PLUG] Web site programming

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006 12:03:53 -0800
Aaron Burt <aaron at bavariati.org> dijo:

> > I want to create a website that will function as an electronic version
> > of flash cards. There would be a list of questions, each with a
> > drop-down selection tool. <snip>
> 
> Cute.  More a multiple-choice short test, rather than flashcards?
> Would there be time limits or set response times?

No time limits or set response times. It would be for practice sessions
that students could do on their own time. A learning resource, not a
required activity. It would be best if it could be made "fun," that is,
perhaps a reward if the score on a page is high enough or something. 

> > There would be several hundred questions. Each time the student opened
> > the page it would present 20-30 or so selected at random from the
> > several hundred. Thus, the student would always be presented with a new
> > set of questions. 
> 
> Would this be plain ol' random, where there could be repeats, or a
> shuffle (like a deck of cards), where there would be no repeats?

There should be repeats. That would increase the difficulty level, but
that is a good thing. Students do not learn the answers if they derived
the right answer by counting cards. (I hate Bridge, because I can never
remember what has been played.) 

> > There is an additional problem to surmount: The drop-downs and some of
> > the text on the page must be displayed in a font that has a complete
> > set of characters for the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
> 
> IMO the best way to deal with this is to simply use GIF images of the
> IPA characters.  Make sure the images are pulled from static URLs on
> the webserver so the browser can cache them easily.
> 
> You do lose the ability to have the characters in drop-down boxes, but
> for a multiple-choice test, it's nicer to have all the options lined-up,
> visible and clickable rather than hidden inside a combobox.

OK, this might work. But there are 110 IPA "letters," plus about 20
superscripts, and about 30 diacritics, any of which could appear on
about half the characters. Suppose I put GIFs of all ~160 characters at
the top of the page, and each question just has a box in which to type
the character, two spaces wide. The student puts the cursor in the box
next to a question, clicks on the appropriate GIF image(s), and the
character with diacritics and/or superscripts appear in the box. This
would be better than a drop-down box because, as you point out, all the
glyphs are visible at once. The only drawback is the space on the page
that the display of characters takes up.

> It's also possible to make the GIF/IPA thing configurable; maybe there's
> even a reliable way to ask the browser if it can display IPA.

If I am correct and the secret is to set the browser to UTF-8, then
that's what the site needs to query the browser about. However, the IPA
font must appear in the box next to the question when the student
clicks on a GIF image, and that means the box must be set to use a font
that has the IPA characters. Windows boxes have Arial Unicode and
Lucida Sans Unicode, both of which have the full IPA character set. I
assume there is a way to set the boxes to use a certain font.

> > Other than needing the display the IPA characters correctly, I'm pretty
> > sure this is just a matter of tying a database with fields for the
> > "question" and for the IPA characters to the page. I have no idea how
> > this is done, but I assume I can learn it.
> 
> Most definitely.  Any way you like from Perl/CGI to Ruby on Rails.

I have to learn a programming language? Can't I just get an app where I
can poke at stuff until it works? Colin's suggestion of WebGUI sounded
pretty good.

> > However, I also want to make a similar page where the "question" is a
> > sound file, using the same IPA character drop-downs as above. This may
> > be a bigger problem. I know it is possible to have sounds on a website
> > -- there are lots of them out there that I have been using. However,
> > would it be possible to tie several hundred sound files in a database
> > for the questions, so that the sound files would be presented
> > randomly?
> 
> Yup.  Databases can hold anything, including pathnames to the
> soundfiles, or the soundfiles themselves.  Might want to have a
> configuration thingy at the beginning to choose what sort of soundfiles
> to use.  (I.e. "Click here.  If that doesn't work, click here.")
> 
> Ever since I made an ugly voicemail-retrieval webpage for an Asterisk
> server, I've been looking for good examples of pages with clickable
> cross-platform sounds.  If you run across any, lemme know.

That brings up another question. Turns out I not only know next to
nothing about website programming, I also know little about sound file
formats. Assuming I want to be www compliant, and I want to support IE,
Firefox, Opera and Safari and the three OSs, MacOS, Linux and Windows,
what would be the most compatible sound format?