Arabic-L:GEN:Review of Encyclopedia of Islam, CD-ROM for Mac

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 08 Sep 2003
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1) Subject:Review of Encyclopedia of Islam, CD-ROM for Mac

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1)
Date: 08 Sep 2003
From: Albrecht Hofheinz <Albrecht_Hofheinz at web.de>
Subject:Review of Encyclopedia of Islam, CD-ROM for Mac

At long last, E.J. Brill has taken the laudable step of publishing the
CD-ROM version of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI, New Edn.) in a format
accessible not only to PC, but also to Macintosh users. I have recently
forwarded Brill's press release on this, and as promised am following
it up now with a review. This review is not concerned with the content
of the Encyclopaedia, which will be known to most on this list. It will
only deal with technical matters, specifically those concerning the
Macintosh platform.

In its current version, the CD-ROM includes the full text of the eleven
main volumes of the EI (that is, the complete alphabet), including maps
and images, as well as the Index of Subjects to Volumes I-XI and the
Index of Proper Names to Volumes I-X. The Indices are not a simple
reproduction of their printed sisters, but have been adapted for
electronic use, with lemmata hyperlinked to the relevant entries in the
text. Purchase of the CD-ROM also grants access to the online version
of the EI, which Brill promises "will gradually be updated and
extended".

Pricing: Individuals EUR 440.00/USD 550.00; institutions 1-5 users EUR
1445.00/US$ 1806.00; institutions 11 and more users EUR 2895.00/US$
3619.00

http://www.brill.nl/eicd/

The version reviewed here has clearly improved from Brill's first
release of the EI on CD-ROM in 1999 (which was only available to
Windows-users at the time). Most importantly, "Find" and "Search" --
two separate ways of searching, which confused many early users -- have
been unified into a single "Search" pane much easier to understand and
use. Stop words are no longer used in searches, meaning you can search
even for the most common words. Search and display operations are
reasonably fast -- your mileage may vary of course depending on your
hardware. Images are now displayed inline, and can be enlarged in a
separate window, unlike the previous version where only a black
rectangular box indicated the existence of an image -- this had to be
clicked to display the image.


Installation and system requirements

The Macintosh version needs at least a PowerPC G3 processor running at
233 MHz and 64 MB of RAM. The CD instructions also ask for 200 MB of
free disk space, although what ends up on your hard disk after a full
install is only 11.7 MB -- in other words, you will need to put the CD
in the drive and keep it there in order to run the EI. It is
unfortunate that users are not given the choice of installing the full
package onto their hard disks, since this would clearly speed up
searching.

Brill states that the Macintosh version requires "OS 8.1 to 9.x or OS
X". This is correct (though I didn't have a chance to test under OS 8),
but users of OS X should have been told upfront that the CD installs
and runs only in Classic mode.

In another restriction, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 is needed to
display the CD's content. On the Macintosh platform, MSIE was a good
browser for a number of years, but is now being phased out, as
Microsoft has stopped its further development.

Both these restrictions -- to the Classic environment and to MSIE --
are not really understandable. Content of the CD is displayed using a
mixture of HTML and JavaScript. Transliteration relies on Brill's own
transliteration fonts ("Baskerville MT for Brill"), which are installed
onto your system and then become available system-wide in other
applications too (so that you can easily copy and paste text from the
EI into other applications; the Macintosh clipboard preserves font
information). In other words, with some attention to
standards-compliant implementation, any HTML- & JavaScript-aware
application should have been capable to render the content of the CD.
And indeed, with Brill's Baskerville MT fonts installed into my OS X
Fonts folder (easily copied there manually from the OS 9 installation),
I am able to read the online version of the EI with various OS X
browsers, without recourse to the CD (and with a broadband connection
this is at least as fast as the CD). Of the browsers tested under OS X,
MS Internet Explorer 5 (I used 5.2.2) renders the online version
generally flawlessly (but has problems with links, see below), while
Safari (1.0 (v.85)) and Camino (0.7 - a lean derivative of Mozilla)
have display problems with the current online version but might be used
for occasional reference. Safari displays some words containing
diacritics correctly, others not. I could not recognize an obvious
regularity behind this behaviour which, by the way, also occurs under
MS Windows when accessing the online edition with browsers such as MS
Internet Explorer (6.0) or Mozilla (Firebird 0.6.1)In the case of
Safari, it may be due to the fact that the browser attempts to read
some Baskerville MT characters as Unicode, even though this is not a
Unicode font. Basing Baskerville MT on Unicode, with proper Unicode
indexes, should remove this problem.  The problem with Camino is
different. Camino renders the <form> tags as returns, resulting in a
line break after every word containing special diacritics. I know too
little of HTML and even less of JavaScript to be able to pin down the
syntax errors in the code. But when I checked the code using BBEdit, it
complained, i.a., that "Element <form> requires that the attribute
'action' be specified" -- an error that probably explains the display
problems in Camino.

These limitations may in part be due to Brill's apparent use of
Verity's CD Web Publisher software to produce this CD-ROM
(http://www.verity.com/products/publisher/index.html). I would imagine
that it should not take too much additional effort to clean up the
resulting code and make it more standards-compliant. This should result
in both CD-ROM and online versions of the EI that are fully usable
under OS 8/9 as well as OS X, giving users free choice of what browser
they prefer, instead of limiting them to a single one the development
of which has been arrested.

Under OS 9, MS Internet Explorer is the only browser that will run the
EI-CD. For the online version, Explorer behaves exactly under OS 9 as
under OS X. I have not tested the online version with other OS 9
browsers.


Other glitches

Otherwise, the main issue from a user's point of view is that
hyperlinks work only inconsistently. Links have apparently been
automatically produced using computer software, so all entries are much
more heavily strewn with hyperlinks than there are cross-references in
the printed version. This automatic creation probably also accounts for
the facts that some cross-references are not living hyperlinks
themselves. There are two types of links -- HTML and JavaScript. HTML
links will open the target in the same frame as the original text.
JavaScript links are designed to run a search on the highlighted term
in the background, opening the results in the "Results" frame to the
left. It is not transparent according to what criteria one or the other
form of linking is employed. This issue is of course one that is not
specific to the Macintosh version, but will be found in the Windows and
online versions as well.

On the Mac, links containing diacritics do not work in the online
version if one uses MS Internet Explorer. Explorer has no problems with
such links in the CD version, and online links work fine in Safari and
in Camino...

Greek text is rendered in Brill's "KadmosNieuw" font, also installed
onto the system during initial setup. In both Internet Explorer and in
Camino, however, accented Greek characters are not correctly displayed.
Interestingly, Safari does not suffer this problem. Greek text copied
from Safari and pasted into MS Word, however, ends up just the same as
it is displayed under Explorer/Camino. The reason behind this probably
lies in the different ways of encoding used on the various systems, and
the implementation of lack of of Unicode, but again I am no expert in
this issue and therefore limit myself here to pointing out the end
effect noticeable to the user.

In the Search pane, clicking the "Search" button after selecting the
"Hits" radio button does not work in MS Internet Explorer. You can
still search by hitting return in any of the two Search Text fields.
Safari and Camino do not exhibit this problem.


Summary

The Macintosh version of the Encyclopaedia of Islam CD-ROM is a very
welcome addition to our library, and I would not want to miss it even
though I have the printed volumes on my shelf. Both will continue to
live side by side, as both paper and CD have their specific advantages,
such as readability vs. searchability. The Macintosh version of the CD
does what it promises to do. It offers full electronic access to the EI
for users of OS 9 or Classic and MS Internet Explorer, and that is fair
enough. As development continues, however, I do hope that the next
edition of the CD irons out the glitches described above and provides a
more widely accessible and standards-compliant interface. It shouldn't
be too hard to do.

Albrecht Hofheinz
Centre for Modern Oriental Studies
Berlin

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End of Arabic-L:  08 Sep 2003