LIBRARY AND INFORMATION RESOURCES NETWORK GATEWAY 3.5. Release Notes

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1 Release Notes New Features The LIRN Gateway is a hosted portal to resources in the LIRN collection. This is a brief summary of the changes in the December 2012 release, also known as Gateway version 3.5. Responsive Web Design The technical team has seen a marked increase in the number of users accessing LIRN using mobile internet devices -- predominantly tablets -- over the past year. The use of these devices is projected to continue to grow substantially, thus the main focus of this Gateway release was to improve the support for these devices. After exploring various options for best supporting these devices, a web design technique known as Responsive Web Design was chosen. The use of Responsive Web Design allows LIRN to maintain a single set of web pages for desktop as well as mobile users, while customizing the way each page looks in a way that is appropriate for each device s capabilities. For this release of the Gateway, the focus was supporting the 10 and 7 inch tablet devices. At this time, using a 4 inch smart phone screen is not considered viable user experience, as none of the LIRN vendors have currently optimized their web sites for screens of that size. Both portrait and landscape orientation have been accommodated, with the web pages adapting their layout to best take advantage of the extra horizontal or vertical space offered by each orientation. This is the first release of the Gateway to use this technology, and it will be incrementally refined and improved over the next few releases. Browser Information The LIRN IP Reporter functionality on the Training page has been replaced with a Browser Information tool. Now, users can use that tool to display important information about the web browser, operating system, screen size, IP address, and browser capabilities. This information can be very important to the technical team for diagnostics, especially if reporting a layout issue that may be related to the Responsive Web Design changes. PAGE 1 OF 6

2 Administration Functionality The LIRN administration application has been updated: NEW Gateway Menu links to take your users directly to the view of your choice NEW You can now see the IP address range(s) assigned to your institution NEW Instructions for how to add article level links has been added The report screen has expanded descriptions of the available reports, and the page s layout has been simplified Changed Behavior The use of IFRAMEs is not supported While working with a few of our members, the technical team has discovered numerous problems created by trying to use vendor databases from the LIRN collection within an HTML IFRAME. The technical team has strongly recommended against the use of IFRAMEs for many years now, and the Gateway now enforces that. The May 2012 Gateway 3.4 release added JavaScript to break out of any containing IFRAMEs, and the Gateway 3.5 release now uses the X-Frame-Options header to enforce this from the server level as well. If you are currently attempting to use IFRAMEs for the LIRN collection, you should update your web pages to open LIRN in a new tab or window instead, which is functionally equivalent to the JavaScript work-around implemented in the prior 3.4 release. PAGE 2 OF 6

3 If you do not update your web pages, the IFRAME content will either be blank in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, or display the following error in Internet Explorer: Enhanced Error Reporting The Gateway now reports errors for more failure conditions with both a diagnostic message and an instructional message for the user. These messages will aid the technical team in determining the cause of problems more easily, and in some cases are able to offer the user a simple remedy for common client configuration issues. Legacy URLs If you are still linking to the legacy /cgi-bin/auth.pl or /auth URLs, please take a moment and update your LIRN links. The /cgi-bin/auth.pl URL now displays a notice for 10 seconds before taking the user into the Gateway. Internet Explorer Compatibility Mode We now explicitly set the rendering mode for Internet Explorer to enable a more consistent experience across different web browsers, as well as to notify users about possible issues before they access one of the LIRN database resources using Compatibility Mode. If a user with Internet Explorer 9 has forced LIRN to be displayed in the Internet Explorer 7 Compatibility Mode, a notice will be displayed to click the Compatibility Mode button ( ) to turn off Compatibility Mode. Updated Content The Home page has been updated with a new Twitter widget. This widget allows users to Reply, Retweet, and Favorite directly from the LIRN home page without having to go to Twitter first. PAGE 3 OF 6

4 The news and announcements section on the home page received a facelift, and now shows a summary line in addition to the news item text. The Products pages have been refreshed with information from the vendors about their collections. The Training page has been updated with a new navigation layout to better support different screen widths, and the training material links have been refreshed. The content of the Leadership tab has been moved into the About page, and the content on the About page has been re-organized so that less content is below the fold, reducing the amount of scrolling the browser to view the page contents. The Change View button on the Databases page was moved outside the Subscriptions box and is more descriptive in its new home above the LIRNSearch box,. The selection dialog has had descriptions added, so that users will have a better idea of what each view does before selecting it. All of the Views -- most notably the Subject View -- have been updated based on member feedback of the initial design. The Alphabetical View now has the lettering selection across the top, rather than down the side, and the Subject View now uses an accordion widget instead of side navigation. The scrollbars in the description text are gone, and all of the views now layout in a manner that is consistent between the views. Performance Enhancements The technical team devoted significant time during the development of this release to tuning the database and queries being run in order to ensure that the Gateway continues to be responsive as LIRN continues to grow its user base. A performance issue with Internet Explorer 8 was identified and corrected that related to the way that usage statistics are gathered. The number of http calls required to log the usage and send the user to the desired resource was reduced and is expected to eliminate the problem that a few Internet Explorer 8 users have occasionally experienced. While adding support for mobile devices, careful attention was paid to overall web page loading performance, as cellular networks are typically high latency, low bandwidth connections. The JavaScript on the LIRN web site has been tuned for performance, as well as run through tools that warn of potential problems on different browsers. The size of the JavaScript files has been reduced, resulting in faster downloads. The way that the icons and image files on the LIRN web site are loaded has been updated to improve the load times and reduce possible delays in displaying the web page while the images are being downloaded. Browser DNS prefetching is used to perform server name to IP address mapping prior to the browser accessing resources from the server, resulting in faster page loading. Several web page performance tools have been used to confirm that the Gateway is following current best web design practices as are practical, and to identify areas for future work. PAGE 4 OF 6

5 Overall load times for the LIRN pages has been reduced by 30% on average from initial request until the page has finished loading. Supported Web Browsers The technical team monitors what technologies are using to access LIRN, as well as what technologies are supported by our vendors. We also watch general Internet trends to ensure that the Gateway will be able to support new and upcoming technologies as they are adopted by users. While we attempt to make the Gateway work with as many platforms combinations as possible, the newer web browsers support capabilities that allow for enhanced functionality to be added. We check older browsers to ensure that they work as well as they are able to, but some older browsers may not display pages correctly, or not support certain features. If your IT departments have not already updated your systems to at least Internet Explorer 8, we encourage you to talk to them to find out what their plans are for browser upgrades. We anticipate that Internet Explorer 8 will become the new baseline during 2013 for the optimal user experience from the database vendors with the usage of Internet Explorer 7 decreasing as the end of support for Windows XP nears. At the time of this writing, the browsers supported include: Gale Cengage Learning Internet Explorer 7.x to 8.x on Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista, and 7 Firefox 3.x to 3.5.x on Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista and 7; Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.6; Linux Safari 4.x on Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista, and 7; Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.6 Opera 9 on Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista and 7; Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.6 Chrome 5 on Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista and 7; Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.6 ProQuest Internet Explorer 7 and later Firefox 10 and later Chrome 18 and later Safari 5 and later CREDO Reference Internet Explorer 7 and later Firefox 3 and later Chrome 8 and later PAGE 5 OF 6

6 Safari 3 and later Opera 11 and later LIRN Gateway The Gateway supports Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, and 10 (both Desktop and Metro versions). Internet Explorer 6 and older are not supported. The use of Internet Explorer 7 is decreasing rapidly as schools move away from Windows XP in preparation for the end-of-support on April 8, 2014 for Windows XP. The current release of Firefox, as well as the designated Extended Support Releases, are supported. At the time of this writing Firefox 10 is the current ESR version and Firefox 17 is the current release. Since the Chrome browser performs automatic updates, the Gateway is tested against the current Chrome release, as well as the preview of the upcoming Chrome release, currently 23 and 24 respectively. Opera also performs automatic updates, so the current version of Opera is tested, which is 12 as of this writing. Mobile platform testing includes Windows 8, ios 6, and Android 4 on devices with 10 and 7 inch screens in both landscape and portrait orientation. Known Issues There are a few minor display issues with Internet Explorer 10 on the Products page. Some lower resolution devices may have some minor layout quirks due to the variances of display resolutions. The Products page sub-navigation menu and the tables on the About page in the Trustees and Officers and Staff tab are known examples where this can occur. The Nook has been observed to take as long as 20 seconds after a button press to contact the LIRN servers and then connect to the database vendor. It is unclear at this time what is causing the 20 second delay. Some Android devices may not open database connections in a new browser tab. Bowker s Books in Print displays a 400 Server Error screen on the Kindle Fire HD. PAGE 6 OF 6