soledad penadés

Some of you may know and others may not know, but I am not contributing directly in the organization of ifparty this year for several reasons. Even though I am providing certain assistance if it's on my hands. For example, this week I have been submitting and providing info to Webkit's developers to be able to fix the weird behaviour that Safari exhibits when trying to use ifparty's new web.

I'll explain what happens. This year's site has been completely built by someone else. He changed the templating system with something he made, more simple and with which he was more comfortable. But with safari it's impossible to go almost anywhere. With a pair of clicks, the page gets to a Safari error message and that's all you can get:

Safari can’t open the page.
Too many redirects occurred trying to open “http://ifparty.scenesp.org/06/?section=register&language=ct?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register?section=register”. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page.

I thought this may have something to do with the way the pages were served, lots of redirections and more specially... relative url's for the redirections. I read once that it was tecnically wrong. That was not an standard: http redirections have to use absolute full formed url's. Although usually browsers just ignore this for allowing thousands of pages to continue working. So that's why I thought the reason could be on that.

Anyway, not having time to try to fix the code of the page and just inspired by a post in Surfin' Safari blog (which is highly interesting, by the way) I decided to submit the bug to the Webkit team.

In fact, there are two bugs there. One, the problem with relative urls just formed with ?parameters and flash appending the new value to the existing url, instead of replacing the appropiate parameters. That one is already fixed! They were very fast and I can't do less than thank them for that efficiency. Here's the bug page, just in case you feel curious: Query string always appended to Flash URLs, instead of being replaced. The other bug has something to do with the redirection limit exceeded error and I don't have any clue of why does it happen, nor do have the guys from webkit. Seems like it's something outside their bounds and they suggested me to report the bug to Apple. Let's hope Apple engineers are as efficient as webkit ones and we will be able to browse ifparty's website in Safari quite soon! :)

Meanwhile you can browse the site with Camino or Firefox from your mac (don't even think about explorer, you know it sucks terribly, specially on mac, and even more with that old interface which looks like "You've Got Mail" interfaces), and don't forget to register yourself in the party, as organizers are willing to prepare all but they need to know how many people is going to the party!