What's Missing From Oscailt?

During the design and development of Oscailt 3, there were several elements that we would like to have put into oscailt, but, for whatever reason, we decided not to for this release. In general, we took the position that we didn't know which features would be most important for users so that some of those features which would be nice but which we didn't need ourselves at indymedia.ie would be left to subsequent releases and would be dependant on demand. Here we list some of them.

UTF-8 support.

Oscailt currently produces latin-1 output. Implementing UTF-8 support would not be difficult but would be somewhat tedious to do. Essentially it will require us to go through the code and change the calls to common PHP string libraries for their mb_string equivalents. Since none of us speak any languages which use non-latin character sets, we decided that we would wait until there was a group who wanted to use Oscailt with a non-latin script and we would seek their assistance in carrying it out.

Versioning

Oscailt objects have placeholders for versioning but this is not fully implemented at this stage. Development of Oscailt 4 is already underway and it will be based on a new network storage model which will offer full support for versioning.

-- ChekovFeeney - 20 Feb 2006