YellowTip Webpage Annotator Beta Release Notes

Introduction

The purpose of the YellowTip Webpage Annotator is to help intermediate and advanced students of Chinese to read Chinese text that would be otherwise too difficult and time-consuming to read. Web pages can contain traditional Chinese characters, simplified characters, or even a mixture of both. Web pages may use any valid character encoding capable of displaying Chinese text, including UTF-8, Big5, and GB2312. However, we should note that in this Beta release, the success rate is much higher for UTF-8 encoded sites than for sites using other encoding.

IMPORTANT: This is only a Beta Release. There are serious limitations to the present technology. As a Beta Release, existing problems may not be corrected in a timely fashion. Do not rely on the results.

Security and Privacy Considerations

Web page annotation involves the parsing and modification of webpages. Therefore we do not recommend the use of this feature on pages containing private or sensitive information.

Known Limitations

Due to the variety of construction techniques of third-party websites, we will never be able to guarantee that YellopwTip can accurately annotate and reproduce every outstanding webpage. Additionally, certain sites use tecnologies or techniques which do not let themselves to the YellowTip technology. Here's a summary of the major limitations we are aware of:

1. Pages nested inside a frame are not annotated. YellowTip only annotates the main page itself. It makes no attempt to annotate pages included via frames.
2. Pages built using XML/XSL such as RSS feeds, will not be annotated correctly.
3. Text displayed by plug-ins, such as Adobe Flash or Java applets, are not annotated. To determine whether a certain area of the webpage is being rendered by a plug-in, simply move the mouse pointer to the area in question and press the right mouse button to see the popup menu.
4. Text generated on-the-fly via browser scripts, such as JavaScript or VBScript, are not annotated.
5. YellowTip popup appears underneath certain plug-ins, such as Adobe Flash players or Java applets. The YellowTip popup normally appears on top of all other page components but may be obscured by plug-ins.
6. Mozila Firefox users. When annotating any non-UTF8 pages (such as Big5 or GB2312 pages) the browser seems to ignore the page encoding, therefore displaying the Chinese text incorrectly. Simply manually change the encoding to the original encoding to have the characters displayed correctly.

Feedback and Error Reporting

If you think that you have found an error or limitation not listed above, please let us know at but make sure that you provide the following information:

• URL of the page you wanted to annotate
• Browser name and version number
• Operating systems name and version number