Questions about my poll

Imported from Yahoo
21

Huw,

I am sorry you have removed the publish to Excel option as I used this to

further analyse the results produced by SailWave. In particular
- to allow me to do personal handicapping based on the mechanisms outlined
in RYA YR2
- to allow me to do calculations based on RYA YR2 for the annual return
- to allow me to add up numbers of boats sailing in the various classes
being raced
- to calculate who has raced the most number of times
- to count how many boats raced in each race by and the number of DNF, DNS,
OOD codes<

It's back in generalised form - I wanted to make sure that's it's clear that
all I do is write a HTML file and then open it with Word/Excel - i.e. I'm
not generating a Word/Excel format file.

If you can produce a format, say XML, that can be used by various different

packages - web browser, word processor & spreadsheet for example then fine -
then great, but to remove functionality that has been provided is a
retrograde step in my view.<

Quite high up on the list...

Thanks for your feedback,

Regards,
Colin J
www.sailwave.com

···

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22

Huw,

In reality I don't interface to Excel - I just create the HTML file and use

Excel to open it. So removing the option just removes a convenience... CJ<

Apologies for that reply... I've started knocking up a 'publish result to
XML' ditty - currently it just creates the competitor list. See link below
for example:-

http://www.sailwave.com/stuff/sw.xml

ch is a 'competitor handle' there will also be a race handle (rh) and then
results will point to a ch and a rh.

Regards,
Colin
www.sailwave.com

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Huw Pearce [mailto:huw.pearce@bcs.org.uk]
Sent: 28 March 2003 17:14
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [sailwave] Questions about my poll

Colin,

I am sorry you have removed the publish to Excel option as I used this to
further analyse the results produced by SailWave. In particular
- to allow me to do personal handicapping based on the mechanisms outlined
in RYA YR2
- to allow me to do calculations based on RYA YR2 for the annual return
- to allow me to add up numbers of boats sailing in the various classes
being raced
- to calculate who has raced the most number of times
- to count how many boats raced in each race by and the number of DNF, DNS,
OOD codes

If you can produce a format, say XML, that can be used by various different
packages - web browser, word processor & spreadsheet for example then fine -
then great, but to remove functionality that has been provided is a
retrograde step in my view.

I thought your using HTML to provide a formatted output was an excellent
move on your part because it removed the need for you to deal with printing
in SailWave passing it off to another application whose coders have more
time to deal with the issues, whilst you concentrate on the core
requirements of SailWave, i.e. producing race results.

With regard to those users who use OpenOffice - I strongly believe that
their word processing and spreadsheet components are very compatible with
Microsoft Office. This was one of the key design goals of the OpenOffice
group and Sun with commercial version called StarOffice.

Enough of my two cents worth.

Time for others to comment.

Kind regards,
Huw Pearce

-----Original Message-----
From: Colin Jenkins [mailto:colin@sailwave.com]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 3:45 PM
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [sailwave] Questions about my poll

Andreas/Donald et al

please do not use other software products for publishing! We don't have

MS-Office on our club (we use OpenOffice) so we couldn't publish something
in the future.<

I agree. In fact I've removed the excel and word publishing destinations -
they were not 'real' in that all that happened is that Sailwave wrote the
html file and then opened it with word or excel - I think their existence is
causing a lot of confusion - I would prefer to work with people to get the
HTML out of Sailwave such that the do not have to do any other work - this
was the original intention. I always worry when I see excel generated
Sailwave results on web sites - especially when they don't actually look any
better then the HTML that Sailwave produces!

I'll add some page controls as requested by Donald; most modern browsers
understand the media control stuff these days.

I still think that generating HTML (or XML) and *then* using 'something' to
view/print it is a usable and useful model. I could write code to print
directly to a printer but it would *never* satisfy everybody's
requirements - whereas the HTML route can get much closer; especially with
style sheets.

We also need a friendly user interface to generate a Sailwave style sheet
file - then folk can generate a style without having html/css knowledge.

Regards,
Colin J
www.sailwave.com

Regards,
Colin

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23

Colin Jenkins sprayed this onto the 'net at 28/03/2003 15:45:

Andreas/Donald et al

please do not use other software products for publishing! We don't have
   

MS-Office on our club (we use OpenOffice) so we couldn't publish something
in the future.<

Glad to hear there are other OpenOffice users out there, I used to do the results for our club in OpenOffice Calc, before I discovered Sailwave.

I'll add some page controls as requested by Donald; most modern browsers
understand the media control stuff these days.

I still think that generating HTML (or XML) and *then* using 'something' to
view/print it is a usable and useful model. I could write code to print
directly to a printer but it would *never* satisfy everybody's
requirements - whereas the HTML route can get much closer; especially with
style sheets.

There's certainly a lot you can do in HTML/CSS to give the right hints to printers about things like column headers and page breaking. In particular using the <THEAD></THEAD> and <TBODY></TBODY> elements within your table to separate the header rows from the body of the table means that intelligent web browsers, fed the right CSS, will actually print the column headers at the top of everry page for a multi-page table. Something that definitely helps when you've got a long competitor list to worry about.

Similarly there are CSS properties for hinting whereabouts a page break can safely be insterted by the browser when printing that should help out getting a more sensible layout when you're printing.

I'd say that your current thoughts of sticking to HTML/CSS for the formatted output (along with either CSV or XML for an unformatted data output) is the way forward, rather than attempting to write to any proprietary document format.

James

24

Colin Jenkins sprayed this onto the 'net at 29/03/2003 17:33:

Apologies for that reply... I've started knocking up a 'publish result to
XML' ditty - currently it just creates the competitor list. See link below
for example:-

http://www.sailwave.com/stuff/sw.xml

Colin,

That's a great effort, certainly would reduce the need for most of the
Perl preprocessing script that I currently run over the Sailwave output
to convert it to something that could be published as valid XHTML.

I just hope that you'll be closing the final <sailwaveresults> tag at
the end of the file in the released version, as my XML parsing script
just threw a wobbly over that one! Oh, and my web browser threw up a
parsing error over that too (I use Mozilla which displays XML using a
STRICT XML parser, and so shows errors where they are found).

On another note how difficult would it be to output results as a simple
CSV file that people can then open in any spreadsheet program and use
for all their data manipulation needs, rather than your previous
exporting an HTML file into Excel (which as you say is hardly an elegant
way to do it)?

Thanks for everything Sailwave

James

25

Hi James,

I just hope that you'll be closing the final <sailwaveresults> tag at

the end of the file in the released version<

It's weird; the file itself is complete with the closing tag but my browser
(IE 6) bombs out half way through it - I can't see what's wrong with it, but
yes I'm sure I'll be able to fix it. Thanks for the feedback.

Regards,
Colin J
www.sailwave.com

···

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26

Oooh, just thing of the possibilities for processing and server side
automatically generating linked pages and the like using XML Stylesheets.
XML output would be a excellent addition.

Steve

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Colin Jenkins [mailto:colin@sailwave.com]
Sent: 29 March 2003 17:34
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [sailwave] Questions about my poll

Huw,

>In reality I don't interface to Excel - I just create the HTML
file and use
Excel to open it. So removing the option just removes a
convenience... CJ<

Apologies for that reply... I've started knocking up a 'publish result to
XML' ditty - currently it just creates the competitor list. See
link below
for example:-

http://www.sailwave.com/stuff/sw.xml

ch is a 'competitor handle' there will also be a race handle (rh) and then
results will point to a ch and a rh.

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.465 / Virus Database: 263 - Release Date: 25/03/2003

27

Colin,

>I just hope that you'll be closing the final <sailwaveresults> tag

at

the end of the file in the released version<

It's weird; the file itself is complete with the closing tag but my

browser

(IE 6) bombs out half way through it - I can't see what's wrong

with it, but

yes I'm sure I'll be able to fix it. Thanks for the feedback.

As a matter of fact: looking at what the server sent me (using
Ethereal, a open source sniffer), the file
http://www.sailwave.com/stuff/sw.xml
is not correctly closed. This upsets IE6 somewhere after Boat 35.
Closing the file with the correct last lines:
    </competitor>
  </competitors>
</sailwaveresults>
seems to placate IE6 and all boats including Boat 39 are listed
correctly.

Best regards,

Jeroen J.A. Tirion
Regatta Service Europe

28

Hi Jeroen,

You're right; I'd messed up the tag balancing; thanks...

Regards,
Colin
www.sailwave.com

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeroen Tirion [mailto:jeroen.tirion@rse.nu]
Sent: 30 March 2003 20:29
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [sailwave] Re: Questions about my poll

Colin,

>I just hope that you'll be closing the final <sailwaveresults> tag

at

the end of the file in the released version<

It's weird; the file itself is complete with the closing tag but my

browser

(IE 6) bombs out half way through it - I can't see what's wrong

with it, but

yes I'm sure I'll be able to fix it. Thanks for the feedback.

As a matter of fact: looking at what the server sent me (using
Ethereal, a open source sniffer), the file
http://www.sailwave.com/stuff/sw.xml
is not correctly closed. This upsets IE6 somewhere after Boat 35.
Closing the file with the correct last lines:
    </competitor>
  </competitors>
</sailwaveresults>
seems to placate IE6 and all boats including Boat 39 are listed
correctly.

Best regards,

Jeroen J.A. Tirion
Regatta Service Europe

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29

The results can be sent to CSV using the File+Export function. Not as
complete as the HTML results but it's a start - I'll be working on this at a
later date to improve publishing flexibility in general. Thanks for
comments on XML. CJ.

On another note how difficult would it be to output results as a simple

CSV file that people can then open in any spreadsheet program and use
for all their data manipulation needs, rather than your previous
exporting an HTML file into Excel (which as you say is hardly an elegant
way to do it)?<

Thanks for everything Sailwave

James

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···

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30

Huw

Would it be possible for you to post an example Excel file or files
to the files section here, showing your workings for personal
handicap, and the other things you mention.

It would really help us at Langstone SC and maybe others as well.

Yes, we could do the same thing ourselves given time, but why re-
invent the wheel?

Does the export to .csv option work as well as a direct publish to
Excel?

would be really grateful for your help

Jenny Fletcher

Colin,

I am sorry you have removed the publish to Excel option as I used

this to

further analyse the results produced by SailWave. In particular
- to allow me to do personal handicapping based on the mechanisms

outlined

in RYA YR2
- to allow me to do calculations based on RYA YR2 for the annual

return

- to allow me to add up numbers of boats sailing in the various

classes

being raced
- to calculate who has raced the most number of times
- to count how many boats raced in each race by and the number of

DNF, DNS,

···

--- In sailwave@yahoogroups.com, "Huw Pearce" <huw.pearce@b...> wrote:

OOD codes

31

Jenny,

I have added to the files section of the SailWave Yahoo Group the Excel file
generated and used to calculate a whole pile of statistics for the Wednesday
Evening series last year ad will be using again this year, it includes the
calculation of Personal Handicap for each boat competing in each race and
then estimating the series value.

Note the information I calculated was for competitor interest and not used
to calculate results based on the PH value. This might change this year!

Kind regards,
Huw

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Jenny Fletcher [mailto:jfletcher@jafconsulting.freeserve.co.uk]
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 10:51 AM
To: sailwave@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [sailwave] Re: Questions - a message for Huw Pearce

Huw

Would it be possible for you to post an example Excel file or files
to the files section here, showing your workings for personal
handicap, and the other things you mention.

It would really help us at Langstone SC and maybe others as well.

Yes, we could do the same thing ourselves given time, but why re-
invent the wheel?

Does the export to .csv option work as well as a direct publish to
Excel?

would be really grateful for your help

Jenny Fletcher

--- In sailwave@yahoogroups.com, "Huw Pearce" <huw.pearce@b...> wrote:

Colin,

I am sorry you have removed the publish to Excel option as I used

this to

further analyse the results produced by SailWave. In particular
- to allow me to do personal handicapping based on the mechanisms

outlined

in RYA YR2
- to allow me to do calculations based on RYA YR2 for the annual

return

- to allow me to add up numbers of boats sailing in the various

classes

being raced
- to calculate who has raced the most number of times
- to count how many boats raced in each race by and the number of

DNF, DNS,

OOD codes

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