What’s going on here is that the new site is what they call a Single Page App, which means that the site logic and processing largely takes place in the browser. So this is why you have to download a bunch of code to get it working. The reason we do it like this is so that once the code is there, everything should work faster and more reliably, and we can enable offline use.
The performance of this, however, can and should be improved, and we will look into this in coming months. There are things we can do to optimize how the code is loaded and handled (PRPL); and also there are major improvements in our underlying platforms coming soon (Polymer 3, web components in Firefox). So hopefully it is good enough for now, and will get better in the near future.
Also, after clicking “what’s new”, the section comes into focus in the nav, but the page opens in the new tab, so the app stays on Offline while What’s New is incorrectly highlighted:
This would be good because suttas like an2.11 up to an2.20 could then be referenced by the same URL, since SuttaCentral returns Error 404: Item not found. This would fix SC search for suttas without direct URI’s but neither SC->D&D linking nor D&D search (see below).
Works (green popup) on SuttaCentral (but not always on the first try) and returns
Parallels for MN 1 Mūlapariyāya Sutta (M): EA 44.6//T 125.44.6 (MN i 1); MA 106//T 26.106 (MN i 1); T 56 (MN i 1)
Parallels for MN 1#25 Mūlapariyāya Sutta (M): Kv 9.2#13 (MN i 1)
Retrieved from https://suttacentral.net/mn1/en/sujato on Fri Mar 09 2018 01:58:42 GMT+0100.
It would be awesome if by selecting let’s say first two paragraphs and then clicking cite button the selected text would be formatted as (markdown and) html and copied to the clipboard for easy quoting online:
> “There are, mendicants, these two powers. What two? The power of reflection and the power of development. And what, mendicants, is the power of reflection? It’s when someone reflects: ‘Bad conduct of body, speech, or mind has a bad, painful result in both this life and the next.’ Reflecting like this, they give up bad conduct by way of body, speech, and mind, and develop good conduct by way of body, speech, and mind, keeping themselves pure. This is called the power of reflection.
>
> And what, mendicants, is the power of development? It’s when a mendicant develops the awakening factors of mindfulness, investigation of principles, energy, rapture, tranquility, immersion, and equanimity, which rely on seclusion, fading away, and cessation, and ripen as letting go. This is called the power of development. These are the two powers.”
---[AN 2.12](https://suttacentral.net/an2.11-20/en/sujato) (Sujato Bhikkhu, Trans. 05.01.2015). In SuttaCentral, Early Buddhist texts, translations, and parallels. Retrieved from https://suttacentral.net/an2.11-20/en/sujato on 00:45, March 09, 2018
“There are, mendicants, these two powers. What two? The power of reflection and the power of development. And what, mendicants, is the power of reflection? It’s when someone reflects: ‘Bad conduct of body, speech, or mind has a bad, painful result in both this life and the next.’ Reflecting like this, they give up bad conduct by way of body, speech, and mind, and develop good conduct by way of body, speech, and mind, keeping themselves pure. This is called the power of reflection.
And what, mendicants, is the power of development? It’s when a mendicant develops the awakening factors of mindfulness, investigation of principles, energy, rapture, tranquility, immersion, and equanimity, which rely on seclusion, fading away, and cessation, and ripen as letting go. This is called the power of development. These are the two powers.”
—AN 2.12 (Sujato Bhikkhu, Trans. 05.01.2015). In SuttaCentral, Early Buddhist texts, translations, and parallels. Retrieved from SuttaCentral on 00:45, March 09, 2018
—AN 2.12 (Pali text from the Mahāsaṅgīti Tipiṭaka Buddhavasse 2500: World Tipiṭaka Edition in Roman Script). Retrieved on 00:45, 3.9.2018
This would be a super useful feature for this kind of scenario:
One is reading a sutta and after reading and pondering one wishes to consult a detailed analysis (in the form of an essay or an in-depth discussion on the forum) or listen to a recorded sutta class on this topic (by utilizing resources in the AV section).
Since most discussions and most AV resources are tagged with sutta ID’s this should be trivial, but because of D&D search limitation this is what happens (let us use an2.12 as an example):
Even for the suttas that have a one-to-one relationship between URI and sutta ID we encounter the same problem (let’s pretend an2.12 is referenced one-to-one with its URI).
Coming from SC->D&D this is the result (No. of hits):
"an2.12 " (0)
[an2.12 ] as substring
While there is actually one exact hit (if one knows that this ID was put down with a coma following it—actually any of these characters following the ID directly would count as a hit: ()[]|\{}@;:- – — ?!"'+.,<>#$%&/=§ space—and probably an2:12 and an2,12 as a typo could also be expected to count as a hit) and one false positive:
“an2.12,” (1)
[an2.12,] as substring
“an2.12” (2)
[an2.12] as substring
AN2.12,
AN2.123
There are of course many more hits! Trying an 2.12 without quotes returns many false positives (all occurrences that have either ‘an’ or ‘2.12’ in the text):
an 2.12 (11)
[an] or [2.12] as substrings
This one again has hits and misses:
“an 2.12” (7)
[an 2.12] as substring
AN 2.12,
AN 2.126
This one misses completely:
"an 2.12 " (0)
[an 2.12 ] as substring
because there is one exact hit with the coma right after the ID:
“an 2.12,” (1)
[an 2.12,] as substring
So what could be the solution? Perhaps some sort of RegEx based search that would know how to identify sutta IDs—maybe something like (an|AN|aN|An)[ ]{0,}2[.:\,]12([^\d]) where an2 and 12 are variables based on initial search ID.
Thus the probable solution lies either in finding a discourse search plugin that supports RegEx or developing one. I have absolutely no experience with discourse platform but I’m willing to help search for the solution. Unless someone has an even better and simpler idea.
Additionally I found an issue with D&D post rich text input field: it is extremely awkward trying to input more than one consecutive grave accent character in the post text field: it displays only the first one and is very difficult to edit afterwards. It’s not a big issue since it is only useful for code blocks (which also appear formatted in the output even when no language is defined—it looks that the CSS from the new theme is responsible for that too).
Probably already seen and factored in but possibly a large number of persons like myself are downloading for offline study. Mentioning just in case it needs to throttled somehow.
Yeah, this happens in Chrome too. I think it’s a bug in the polymer element we use, so we’ll wait until these get updated for Polymer 3, which will no doubt furnish us with a whole new range of fascinating bugs!
Yeah, I’m not quite sure what the correct behavior is here. I guess we should indicate that the link opens in a new tab, and not highlight it.
Yes, I noticed this too. Will look into it.
And what’s wrong with huge smiles, I ask? Again, will look into it.
It does indeed, thanks.
Yes, this would be great and we should make it work better. We’ll probably focus on more immediate needs for now, but will look into this when we have some time later on.
If you’re interested to take this on, it would be truly fantastic. Our developers are of course there to help, but there are just so many things! Perhaps you’d like to join our team for a hangout sometime?
I would love to! Let me first dig around a bit to see if someone else already figured something similar out and then we will know what kind of effort are we talking about.
I doubt my coding skills will be of any use (it was a while and I was working mostly on proprietary platforms all my professional life—‘hangs his head in shame and dons sackcloth and ashes’) but who says old dogs can’t learn new tricks!
I used to be quite skilled in defining clear cut processes and constraints for development though and, as said before, have a supernormal power to find bugs where there are none
That’s great thanks! I think it would be very helpful if you could figure out a way of doing a search for a sutta on this discourse platform that actually gives back the posts where this specific sutta is quoted in the best way possible. I can then implement it in the site.
But I have already had some discussion with the Discourse developers about this and that was not very enlightening: most forums are happy with this level of search so they will not do an upgrade anywhere soon. But like you say, maybe there is some way with wildcards/regex that can be used.
That us just awesome! Brief summaries for the Sujato summaries to look at before reading then Sutta? Just brilliant. Was this like this before and I just missed it or a new addition?
I could not help but express my gratitude to those who made so much effort to build such a great website. I love line-by-line Pali/English suttas with the pop-up dictionary function! Thank you very much.
I only found this new website yesterday, and there were already so many posts discussing bugs, so this post may be inappropriate here. I apologise for cluttering the thread in advance.
Here also, in Safari 10.1.2 (MacOS 10.12.6) and Safari 9.1.3 (MacOS 10.11.6) the site just shows a blank page (though it does load the favicon with the address). Looks fine in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi (Mac OS 10.12), but is also blank in iCab, which like Safari is based on WebKit. Is there something in the coding that is allergic to WebKit?
I’ve been meaning to install Bodhi Linux to start learning the FOSS world, but haven’t got to it yet. I see at least three popular (I believe) Linux WebKit browsers: Konqueror, Midori (the default in Bodhi), Web (formerly Epiphany); if anybody on the crew is running Linux, might try those.
Oh, and the site does load in iOS Safari (11.0), which is also WebKit, but clearly that’s a different set of code, as it’s a mobile version.
Acchariyaṃ, Abbhutaṃ! I’ve been pretty busy lately and haven’t been able to do much with the site yet, but it looks absolutely stunning! Congratulations!
I remember when the announcement came out several years ago that the Nikayas were going to be translated and now it’s actually finished! Yayyyy.
May all of the people who contributed to this project, in any way, at any stage find freedom from suffering.
Brother (you’re a man, right?), I’ve used many Linux distros. I strongly recommend using any of the, say, top ten Linux Distributions (in popularity), but not lower. Popularity means everything, in the way of ensuring there are many volunteers fixing many bugs. Less-popular distros will almost certainly tax you, slowly but surely, with annoying bugs (that there aren’t enough volunteers to fix).
If you love Macs, you might consider trying Elementary OS. If you are used to Windows, you might consider Linux Mint. If you are open to something new-fangled (in its user interface), you might consider Ubuntu 18.04, when it comes out soon (and then scour the privacy-related settings and tighten them up, once installed).
Those would be my top 3 recommendations for any newcomer to the Linux world, based on your experience and style.
No offense, but I feel Firefox and Chromium are light-years ahead of all those browsers. Those browsers (you mentioned) pride themselves on being very, very lightweight (which is pretty much their only likeable quality), but anyone out there with even a 7-year-old Intel-based laptop or newer should be able to run browsers like Firefox and Chromium just fine (in Linux, which is known to be very speedy).
Both Firefox and Chromium are very tight in their efficiency these days, and are very tough acts to beat when it comes to both performance and useability, IMHO. I would further suggest that you’ll want the ad-blocking goodness of Add-ons like uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger.
PS: I migrated my Mom from Safari to Firefox today, across all 3 of her Mac machines (iMac, iPad, iPhone). I don’t think Linux would be appropriate for her!
!
Yayyyy.
