Re: Please wait... indefinitely

Hi Danny,

Danny Ayers wrote:
> First I must say: great to see the service! Could do with a bit more 
> promo though, I only stumbled on it, when I mentioned it on Twitter 
> quite a few people I'd have expected to have known about it were 
> (pleasantly) surprised.

Yes, we love secrets... No, I'm just kidding ;).

Getting the word out is not easy. For instance, today, on the W3C 
twitter account @w3c, there was a link to a blog post entitled "Let's 
Make Every Day One Web Day!". The post encouraged people to use the 
mobileOK Checker among other tools:
  http://www.w3.org/QA/2009/09/lets_make_every_day_one_web_da.html

Is it enough? No. We try to mention such tools as often as we can. You 
can find an incomplete (sigh) list of tools developed at W3C by 
searching for the "Open Source Software" link on the W3C home page. That 
should lead you to:
  http://www.w3.org/Status

Anyway, glad to hear that you like the tool!



> Unfortunately when I try on the URI:
> 
> http://dannyayers.com
> 
> it stays on "The address is being checked. Please wait..." (about half 
> an hour this time).

Hmmm. I think I know what happens. That does involve a bug in the 
mobileOK Checker as well as a weird thing happening on your side though.

Accessing your Web site with a regular Web browser seems to start an 
apparent endless loop. When I try to access the Web page on my local 
machine, I eventually manage to receive an HTTP status code 502 after a 
few minutes, probably returned by some intermediary proxy that gets 
tired of waiting for a response.

The mobileOK Checker has the same problem. It tries to retrieve the 
page, but this takes a few minutes. There is an internal mechanism that 
makes the mobileOK Checker forget about tasks that have run for too 
long, to protect the server from endless loops.

This mechanism has the exact opposite effect in practice (ooops). It 
drops the task as expected, but the task is automatically re-created by 
the client who started the check (and who polls the server every few 
seconds for a status update).

In short, if you leave your browser open, the mobileOK Checker will just 
run endlessly trying to test your page, as you experienced. I created a 
bug to track this down and will fix this as soon as possible.

[ See bug 7702:
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7702 ]

That said, why does your page fail to return a response in a timely 
fashion? (if you do not experience that issue, could you make sure that 
  the access to your Web site is not restricted to a given IP address or 
something similar?)

Thanks for the bug report!
Francois.

> 
> that URI points to a blog which currently is not-quite-valid XHTML 
> Strict. (It may occasionally 500, code's in dev, I take it down when 
> updating).
> 
> Client is Firefox 3.0.14/Ubuntu Jaunty.
> 
> Cheers,
> Danny.
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 22 September 2009 21:21:03 UTC