XML Photo Album

FAQ

Q: What systems can display the albums?

A: Almost any system can view the album. The albums are in standard XML and XSL. The small amount of Javascript should work on most browsers. Most modern browsers support the XSLT standard; some older versions don't. If you can view the index page, your browser supports XSLT. If things fail after that, it's likely a Javascript problem. Versions 1.6.0 and later are confirmed to work on Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, and Google Chrome 1+. So effectively everyone should be able to view the albums.

Q: What systems can generate the albums?

A: The GUI generator we created is guaranteed to run only on Windows with the Microsoft .NET platform v2.0 installed (available from the Windows Update site for Windows 98 and higher). Versions 1.6.0 and later do run reasonably well on Linux with Mono. Some older versions of the generator may work in Linux with Mono, but not especially reliably due to deficiencies in Mono's implementation of parts of the .NET framework. Otherwise, the format for the album is very human-editable, so you could just write the album.xml metadata file by hand and copy over our other files and have a working album.

Q: Why not use server side processing with PHP, ASP, or CGI like many other applications out there?

A: We wanted the albums to be easy to view on absolutely any system, with any distribution medium. We want you to be able to burn an album to a CD and hand it to your grandmother, and have it work. While it is in theory possible to get server-side processing to work on any platform, we also don't want your grandmother to have to install a Perl engine on her computer, or anything else for that matter. If you really want server-side processing, there are server-side XSL transform engines out there.

Q: When I open an album stored on the local hard drive, why does Internet Explorer complain about security issues?

A: Bits of Javascript within the display files try to access other files on the local computer (most notably album.xml). In general you don't want Javascript to have full access to your local hard drive content, but in this case it's harmless, and furthermore necessary to the functioning of the album. If you get really annoyed by it you can change the security settings to stop getting the error, but doing so may pose a security risk. See the help file for how to change this setting.

Q: Why XML, Javascript, and XSL?

A: The alternative, employed by other album generators which want to avoid server-side processing, would be to generate a separate static html page for each image, or to use Flash. One of the goals of this project was to make the album human-editable. Furthermore, by keeping all of the album metadata in a single, easy-to-read and easy-to-parse xml file, it becomes easy for anyone to create a generator/editor program on platforms other than Windows.

Q: Why Visual Basic.NET?

A: Because it was easy.

Q: I hate your color/font scheme.

A: That's not a question. But if you really hate it, you can make your own web display theme! You can easily create new themes by modifying our display files (or by starting from scratch, if you really know what you're doing). Most display options can be changed in the CSS file. One exception is the number of columns displayed on the index page; for this and other "advanced" changes you need to edit the XSL. See the help file for more details about web display themes. If you do make an alternate theme to configure the display, please share it through the project wiki.

Q: How can I contact the developers?

A: You can email us through our accounts at SourceForge. If you want to report a bug, please use the bug reporting facility provided on the SourceForge project page.