iView MediaPro and HTML encoding

This page shows the differences between recent iView versions in regard of HTML encoding. It describes how special characters appear in the HTML code of a web gallery. This is very important as it may result in a non-working gallery when you do not pay attention to the content of the images's IPTC fields, or Annotations and Description/Caption as they are called in iView.

The following comments were written from an EOS template users's point of view. What is described here as disadvantage may be an advantage in a different context. The real pain is that the behavior changes with every version.

Problems arise when the content of meta data (IPTC, XMP, Annotations or Description/Caption) is used in a Javascript variable. Here is an example:

var imagecaption = "(iView:Caption)"

If you have some coding experience you will notice that a line break or a double quote in the variable's value will result in a script error in the web browser. Line breaks must be completely avoided, while double quotes can be used with two solutions: either mask them with a backslash like this \" or use the HTML entity ".

Version 2.6

The good old times. Everything was perfect in this version. Special charcters in all fields were converted to their HTML entities. All line breaks were suppressed and got replaced with the proper HTML code. Using the checkbox next to "Treat captions as raw HTML" it was possible to write HTML code in the image's Description/Caption fields and the characters were kept intact in the output, resulting in valid HTML statements.

Only Precondition:

• Double quotes must be written as \" if Treat captions as raw HTML was checked.

Versions 3.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2

When version 3 was introduced none of the special characters got replaced. Even all line breaks were kept intact. The checkbox next to "Treat captions as raw HTML" had absolutely no effect. It took iView three updates to recognize that as a bug.

Preconditions:

• No line breaks in the Headline and Instructions fields are allowed.
• No line breaks in the Description fields are allowed.
• Double quotes must be written as \".

Versions 3.1, 3.1.1, 3.1.2

This version (released in June 2006) tries to fix the bug with the "Treat captions as raw HTML" option but it's still not the same behavior as in version 2.6. Line breaks get replaced with <br> but only in the Description/Caption field. They are still there in the IPTC fields together with the <br> code! The gallery title stays untouched. And single quotes (apostrophes) get replaced with &apos; which is an entity that is invalid in HTML 4.01 and still unsupported in IE6 and IE7 beta. Can somebody please donate an old PC to the iView team for their tests?

Preconditions:

• No line breaks in the Headline and Instructions IPTC fields are allowed.
• Double quotes in the Description/Caption field must be written as \" if Treat captions as raw HTML was checked.
• Double quotes in the gallery title must be written as \".
• Single quotes (apostrophes) will appear as &apos; in all IE browsers but that gets corrected if you update the EOS template to the latest version.

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