1. Mobile operators altering (and breaking) web content

    We had a complaint that FixMyStreet maps weren’t displaying on someone’s computer. We hadn’t had any other complaints, and we quickly narrowed it down to the fact that the person was on the internet using a tethered T-Mobile phone.

    T-Mobile (and Orange, and quite possibly others) are injecting JavaScript and altering content served over their networks. Their reason for doing this, according to their websites (T-Mobile, Orange), is to compress images and video sent to your browser, so as to speed up your browsing. Seeing it in action, they also inline some CSS and JavaScript, though not all, and remove comments from external files.

    However, their implementation breaks things. In this particular instance, the T-Mobile JavaScript comment stripper appears to be searching for “/*” and “*/” and removing everything inbetween. This might work in most cases; however in the jQuery library, we find a string containing “*/*”, and later down the file, another string containing “*/*”. T-Mobile remove everything between the things it thinks are comment markers, even though they’re actually contained within strings, causing the jQuery library to be invalid JavaScript and stopping anything using jQuery from running.

    Their decision to inline lots of the CSS also seems a bit odd – sure, on a mobile this might be quicker, but even ignoring tethering nowadays plenty of mobiles have caches too and having the CSS download once and be cached would seem better than adding weight to every page download. But I’m sure they’ve studied their decision there, and it doesn’t make any difference to the actual browsing, as opposed to the comment removal.

    To turn off this feature on your mobile phone or broadband, visit accelerator.t-mobile.co.uk or accelerator.orange.co.uk on your connection and pick the relevant option – if anyone knows of similar on other networks, do leave updates in the comments.

    From a FixMyStreet point of view – whilst FixMyStreet functions just fine without JavaScript, I had made the (perhaps incorrect) decision to put the map inside a <noscript> element, to prevent a flash of map-oddity as the JavaScript map overlaid the non-JS one. However, this meant in this circumstance the map did not work, as JavaScript was enabled, but jQuery was unable to be loaded. I haven’t decided whether to change this behaviour yet; obviously it would help people in this situation as the map would still display and function as it does for all those without JavaScript, but for those with JavaScript it does look a bit jarring as the page loads. Any suggestions on a better approach welcome 🙂

  2. TheyWorkForYou video – the Flash player

    TheyWorkForYou video timestamping has been launched, over 40% of available speeches have already been timestamped, and (hopefully) all major bugs have been fixed, so I can now take a short breather and write this short series of more technical posts, looking at how the front end bits I wrote work and hang together.

    Let’s start with the most obvious feature of video timestamping – the video player itself. 🙂 mySociety is an open-source shop, so it was great to discover that (nearly all of) Adobe Flex is available under the Mozilla Public Licence. This meant I could simply download the compiler and libraries, write some code and compile it into a working SWF Flash file without any worries (and you can do the same!).

    Writing a Flex program is split into three main areas – MXML that lays out your application, defines any web services you’re using and so on; CSS to define the style of the various components; and ActionScript to deal with things like events, or talking to the JavaScript in the parent HTML. My code is probably quite shoddy in a number of places – it’s my first application in Flex 🙂 – but it’s all available to view if you want to take a peek, and it’s obviously running on the live TheyWorkForYou site.

    To put a video component in the player is no harder than including an <mx:VideoDisplay> element – set the source of that, and you have yourself a video player, no worrying about stream type, bandwidth detection, or anything else. 🙂 You can then use a very useful feature called data binding to make lots of things trivial – for example, I simply set the value of a horizontal slider to be the current playing time of the video, and the slider is then automatically in the right place at all times. On the downside, VideoDisplay does appear to have a number of minor bugs (the most obvious one being where seeking can cause the video to become unresponsive and you have to refresh the page; it’s more than possible it’s a bug in my code, of course, but there are a couple of related bugs in Adobe’s bug tracker).

    As well as the buttons, sliders and the video itself, the current MXML contains two fades (one to fade in the hover controls, one to fade them out), one time formatter (to format the display of the running time and duration), and three web services (to submit a timestamp result, delete a mistaken timestamp, and fetch an array of all existing timestamps for the current debate). These are all called from various places within the ActionScript when certain events happen (e.g. the Now button or the Oops button is clicked).

    Compiling is a simple matter of running mxmlc on the mxml file, and out pops a SWF file. It’s all straightforward, although a bit awkward at first working again with a strongly-typed, compiled language after a long time with less strict ones 🙂 The documentation is good, but it can be hard to find – googling for [flex3 VideoDisplay] and the like has been quite common over the past few weeks.

    Tomorrow I will talk about moving around within the videos and some bugs thrown up there, and then how the front end communicates with the video in order to highlight the currently playing speech – for example, have a look at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

    1. The Flash player
    2. Seeking
    3. Highlighting the current speech