Lift Assistive Main Page

 

• 1. Upgrading from previous versions
  • 1.1. Upgrading from version 1.9
  • 1.2. Upgrading from version 1.8 or older
• 2. Changes
  • 2.1. Changes in version 2.0
  • 2.2. Changes in version 1.9
  • 2.3. Changes in version 1.8
  • 2.4. Changes in version 1.7
  • 2.5. Changes in version 1.6
  • 2.6. Changes in version 1.5
  • 2.7. Changes in version 1.4
  • 2.8. Changes in version 1.3
  • 2.9. Changes in version 1.2
• 3. Known issues

  

If you are upgrading Lift Assistive from version 1.9, you need to follow these simple and quick steps:

1. Log in as root.
2. Stop the Tomcat service:

   service lift.tomcat stop
           

3. Update the required Lift RPM packages:

   rpm -Uvh lift-tomcat-5.5.20-1.i386.rpm
   	

4. Install the updated Lift Assistive package, with the following command:

   rpm -Uvh lift-assistive-2.0-1.i386.rpm
   	

Please note that the Web Admin pages are now embedded in the Lift Assistive applications, but they are disabled by default. Web Admin can be enabled by defining valid username and password in the configuration file.

 

If you are upgrading Lift Assistive from version 1.8 or older, you need to follow these simple and quick steps:

1. Log in as root.
2. Stop the Tomcat service:

   service tomcat4 stop
   chkconfig tomcat4 off
           

3. If you are running Red Hat 7.3, you need to install the following packages:

   rpm -ivh libgcc-3.2.2-5.fdr.0.rh73.i386.rpm
   rpm -ivh libstdc++3-3.2.2-5.fdr.0.rh73.i386.rpm
   	

4. Install the required Lift RPM packages:

   rpm -ivh lift-common-1.0-1.i386.rpm
   rpm -ivh lift-mozilla-1.7.12-1.i386.rpm
   rpm -ivh lift-tomcat-5.5.20-1.i386.rpm
   	

5. Install the updated Lift Assistive package, with the following command:

   rpm -Uvh lift-assistive-2.0-1.i386.rpm
   	

During the installation a new Linux user is automatically created, named "lift" whose default password is "lift". You should change its password (if you are not the Linux administrator, or don't know how to do it, ask him/her to do it for you; this is critical for security).

Lift Assistive will automatically import the configuration file tt_config.xml, the serial number serial-number.txt and the installed annotations from the previous location. If you changed the Tomcat 4 configuration file /var/tomcat4/conf/server.xml, you will need to change /opt/lift/tomcat/conf/server.xml accordingly.

If not used by other applications, such as Lift Machine, the following old packages can now be removed from the system, they are no more used by Lift Assistive:

rpm -e tomcat4
rpm -e mozilla-liftmachine
    

   

• Lift Assistive is the new name for the old LIFT Text Transcoder. Package names has been renamed as well.
• The application has a new and modern layout.
• The previous Web Admin optional package is no longer optional and is embedded in the application. The new Admin pages allow the administrator to manage new Lift Assistive parameters and options:
  • The new Connections page allows the administrator to change connection parameters and to specify a list of User Agents to be blocked.
  • The new Annotations page allows the administrator to check and update installed annotations, when released by UsableNet developers.
• Smart content delivery: page format can be XHTML 1.1 or HTML 4.01 if the client browser doesn't support XHTML documents.
• Added "[UsableNet Lift Assistive]" string to the User Agent header so web administrators can identify Lift Assistive accesses.
• Added NTLM authentication support.
• New implementation of the Javascript Evironment based on Mozilla Rhino 1.6R4.
• Updated Tomcat component to version 5.5.20.
• Updated Cocoon component to version 2.1.9.
• All Java code has been updated to benefit from the new features of Java 1.5. Java Development Kit 1.5 is now required.
• Fedora Core 5 is now a supported platform.
• Fedora Core 6 is now a supported platform.

 

• Updated the main LA components: Tomcat 5.0.28, Mozilla 1.7.12 and Cocoon 2.1.7.
• Mozilla, Tomcat and Lift Assistive packages are now installed under /opt/lift directory.
• Added cookies handling to the Javascript Environment.
• Now it is possible to open not transcoded documents from a web application running in text-only mode.
• Added server side form validation.
• New frameset URLs representation: reduced framed pages footprint.
• Added an automatic fix to Internet Explorer focus bug on skip links.
• LA now blocks some SPAM bots.
• Now it is possible to run LA on port 80 by simply editing /opt/lift/tomcat/conf/server.xml.
• Removed the cron restart on crash, now it is handled by the new Tomcat daemon.
• Improved performance and reduced footprint.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.
• The Web Admin optional package has an improved Servers page.

 

• LA will now produce HTML 4.01 Strict documents, with improved quality of generated documents.
• Supports LINK element when it defines document relationships (Index, Previous Page, Next Page, Author, Copyright).
• LA can now include the IFRAME content directly in the transcoded page (using annotations).
• Improved the HTTP error page content by adding a link to the previous page.
• Removed View frames individually option.
• Increased cookies support.
• New Annotation Engine for HTTP Requests.
• Added Javascript Environment to the Annotation Engine.
• Security has been improved. If LA is processing a frameset containing a secure frame, LA will use a secure connection (with itself) to produce the transcoded frame.
• Improved performance and footprint.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES/WS 4.0 and Fedora Core 4 are supported now.

 

• Transcoder Parameters section renamed to Text Only Options.
• Now HTML frames are shown simultaneously by default.
• Improved external documents handling (PDF, Microsoft Office and multimedia files) and added Open Not Handled Documents Directly option to open those documents without being notified.
• Improved data tables layout.
• The "Unlimited" license allows to specify entire subdomains to be processed by Lift Assistive.
• Extended XPath to improve the Annotation Engine.
• Performance has been improved.
• Removed the dependency on "Apache Xerces C++" package.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.

 

• Improved cascade stylesheets to help identifying visited links, headers and form controls (new colors) and to show form controls and links getting focus by changing their border and underline style.
• Added the access key T (press ALT + T) to jump to the Transcoder Parameters section.
• New Cookie Manager: now Lift Assistive handles cookies generated by framed pages and cookies that apply to multiple hosts.
• Support of forms sending POST HTTP requests with multipart/form-data content type. This means that Lift Assistive now supports file uploads.
• Support of HTTP Base Authentication on frames.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.

 

• Lift Assistive is now available also on: Sun Solaris 9 for Sparc platform; RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.
• Minor bugs have been fixed.

 

• New Web Admin optional package. When installed it offers a web-based user interface supporting the most common tasks that have to be performed by the administrator.
• New annotation debugging functionality that allows you to see if and when an annotation is applied.
• New way to display frames: Lift Assistive is now capable of displaying simultaneously all frames of a page. The user can set a preference to choose between a simultaneous view of frames or an individual view.
• Redirects implemented via META HTTP-EQUIV are now replaced by server-side redirects, totally transparent to users.
• Meta keywords and descriptions are kept untouched. In this way search engines using them can gather them also from text-mode pages.
• Repeated links are now polished. If Lift Assistive finds two or more adjacent occurrences of links pointing to the same URL, it will collapse them to a single link whose textual label is the concatenation of the original labels. This greatly improves the text-only rendering of bulleted lists of links, where both an image and a textual links are used.
• A number of smaller bugs have been fixed and a lot of smaller improvements in the rendering of text-mode pages have been implemented.

 

• Lift Assistive is now available also on Apple Mac OS X 10.3.
• Added and improved the logging facilities. In particular Lift Assistive now creates a startup log containing data about the initialization of Lift Assistive.
• Fixed a bug related to host names: now Lift Assistive does not distinguish among lower-case and upper-case host names when checking if they can be transcoded and when determining the annotations to be applied.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Lift Assistive to process correctly all the character codings. Previous releases worked only with Western (ISO-8859-1), Japanese (Shift_JIS) and Unicode (UTF-8) pages.
• Fixed a bug that affected version 1.2 related to 'mailto:' and 'ftp:' URLs: now only URLs with HTTP or HTTPS protocols are transcoded.

 

• Greatly extended the annotation machinery that allows a webmaster to configure Lift Assistive so that it produces text-mode pages that are formatted and that contain information and navigation options adapted to the website. New annotations can be used to move navbars to the bottom of the page, to wrap existing content into header elements, to linearize layout tables, to hide unwanted content, to add skip links buttons, etc.
• Improved the layout machinery so that a lot of white (vertical and horizontal) space is removed. This collapses sequences of BR, removes empty P, collapses sequences of spaces. This improves legibility of text-mode pages.
• Added the speed-bump feature to handle end user navigation across the text-mode border. This reduces end user confusion when s/he hits the border.
• Changed the CSS specification for text size in transcoded pages. Now headers are shown with different font size than normal body text, and this improves legibility of text-mode pages.
• Now links within a document (i.e. URL fragments like "#content") are not transcoded. This improves interaction speed as there is no need to request a new page to Lift Assistive.
• Fixed a bug related to spreading of A elements: in XHTML documents that contained empty A elements (like in <A name="content"/> or <A name="content"></A>) Lift Assistive produced incorrect results (due to a bug in its XHTML parser). Part of the problem has been hidden (as visually Lift Assistive does not show this problem anymore). However the code produced by Lift Assistive is still affected by this problem.
  There is an easy workaround though, that is also more standard XHTML usage. If you need to write a named anchor inside a document, rather than adding an empty A element (with its NAME attribute set), define an ID for the element you want to point at (for example an H2) and use that ID as the fragment in the link. For example <a href="#content">...</a> ... <h2 id="content">...</h2> ....
• Minor bugs have been fixed and performance has been improved (by using HTTP compression).

 

Current Java Virtual Machine implementations caches DNS information forever, so if you change IP numbers of processed hosts, Lift Assistive will not be aware of it. You can fix it editing the file java.security and changing the value of variable networkaddress.cache.ttl, as follows:

networkaddress.cache.ttl=60

Lift Assistive on Fedora Core 4 and Fedora Core 3 requires SELinux to be disabled.

There are no other known issues we are aware of. Should you encounter a problem with deploying or using Lift Assistive, please send an email to tt.support@usablenet.com with a detailed description of what you would expect to happen, what actually happened, and on which page it happened. Thank you.