Online Film Dictionary - Latest News

Last update: 08.06.2005

28.04.2012 Submissions: I have closed down submissions for the OFD today. I still have years worth of submissions on disk and need to find time and motivation to work those in before I may or may not reopen the dictionary for submissions. It is undecided yet. The dictionary will stay online and available as a resource though. 08.06.2005 Unicode: Since September 2004 the OFD data has been fed to the web without any HTML encoding in raw text format and it seems to work well with the current browser generation. This will make the step to use Unicode much easier. Since Unicode support in software applications is now well established, I am planning to switch the dictionary to Unicode later this year. This will mean no more missing or circumscribed diacritics for a couple of languages supported by the OFD. If the environment of my ISP does not mock, submitting data in the Unicode format should be painless as well. However there will be quite some changes involved internally, including the change of operating system and storage software plus I need to rework all past submissions for the correct yet omitted diacritics. Thus I cannot anticipate a fixed date for the switch. - Russian: I again received several updates for the Russian part of the dictionary. Please send me updates for Russian in some kind of Windows format, preferably as a Word document. Due to the current working environment, it is hard to process submissions directly and since I do not speak Russian I cannot control the output of any codepage conversions of which multiple would be necessary at the moment. - Updates: Again the OFD has not been updated for quite a long time. I simply found no time. Please be assured that every submission will be processed and nothing gets lost, even if there is a long delay in processing. On the positive side of things, a new language - Icelandic - will be introduced with the update.

14.12.2004
OFD interface and javascript: Please note that recent versions of the Firefox browser come with a default of not allowing javascript to change the contents of the browser's status bar. The OFD makes heavy use of this feature by giving more or less useful hints for links and options. If you want to make use of this feature and you have not already, please allow changes to the text of the status bar by selecting "Preferences/Options->Web Features->Enable Javascript->Advanced->Change status bar text" in your browser.
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HTML hardcoding bug fix: Fixed a bug introduced by the switch to the disabling of HTML hardcoding. If you searched for a term containing diacritics, your search term was still transcoded to contain HTML hardcode. In other words searching for terms with non-ASCII characters was broken since September. Restrictions to searching cyrillic terms still apply.

11.09.2004
HTML hardcoding disabled: If you are interested in Russian film terms, you may have noticed that Cyrillic terms in the OFD were not displayed correctly since quite a while. All Russian terms are internally stored in the Windows-1251 codepage format. Formerly I just transcoded all diacritics into HTML hardcode, i.e. ä became ä etc. Oddly enough this worked for the Russian terms too in Netscape 4.x. However it did not work for the Cyrillic with later browsers. For this reason I have disabled any HTML hardcoding now, all diacritics are in ISO format. Modern browsers are capable of rendering all diacritics correctly directly and without being HTML coded. If you cannot see diacritics properly displayed in the OFD, please let me know your browser and its version.
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If you cannot see the Cyrillic terms correctly when including the Russian language in your searches, please make sure, that your browser is set to autodetect the current codepage or force it to the Windows-1251 codepage format.
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Please also note that on pages in Windows-1251 format, all diacritics in other languages do not display correctly. This is still a workaround until I find a solution to implement the dictionary in Unicode correctly, which is likely not any time soon.

01.02.2004
Interface Update: Thanks to the efforts of Hélène Martin Hernandez, the Online Film Dictionary is now also available in French. Merci, Hélène.

12.06.2003
Updates: The OFD has not been updated for nearly half a year. I apologize to all who were waiting eagerly for their submissions to be made online.
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On the positive side of things a new language has been introduced: Albanian (although it still has only a few terms translated).
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I also worked over the forms a bit: If you have Javascript enabled, all languages are displayed in the interface's language on the status line. This should help users, who are not familiar with the native terms of the languages.

16.01.2002
Hungarian: Thanks to Rita Michelini for spotting some polish terms which were displayed as hungarian.

03.10.2001
Bulgarian: Once again: I don't store the terms in HTML internally, so I cannot use any submission based on HTML. If you want to submit terms for a language which can only be expressed in HTML character codes, please contact me directly. Thank you.

03.10.2001
OFD bugs: Thanks to Taneli Huuskonen who pointed out that my internal routines to convert the data base to HTML were buggy. Doubled diacritics were 'translated' to one single occurrence. While this was no problem with most languages, it was very important for the Finnish translations were the difference of 'ä' and 'ää' can change the meaning of the whole word.

20.05.2001
Thai and languages with other alphabets: I received some additions in plain HTML for the language Thai. I don't store the terms in HTML internally, so I cannot use those for now. If you want to submit terms for a language which can only be expressed in HTML character codes, please contact me directly. Thank you.

18.08.2000
Polski: Thanks to Leia Tomasz for notifying me. Of course the native language term for "Polish" is "Polski" and not "Polska", the latter of which is the native language term for "Poland".

20.07.2000
Format: Sorted the languages displayed alphabetically on all forms.

28.04.2000
Russian: All Russian terms are now integrated into the OFD. Whenever you include Russian into your searches Russian terms found are displayed in the Windows-1251 codepage format and additionally in plain ASCII. However there is a caveeat. If you include any language with diacritics such as e.g. German (ä, ö, ü and ß) into your search, the diacritics of that language will not display properly.
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Please also see the notes pages on how to search for single cyrillic terms in Windows-1251 codepage format.
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It's currently not possible to submit terms in cyrillic. If you have translations to submit, please send me a file in Excel 5.0 file format. If you don't have Excel available, please contact me and we'll find a solution. Thank you.
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Thanks again to Olga Serenkova for doing the russian translations.

23.03.2000
OFD bugs: Thanks to William L. Robboy for notifying me about some bugs in the OFD. The word search did not work and always resulted in a 'Sorry, there was nothing found' message. That problem must have been around since early February and nobody complained. There was also a problem when searching for norwegian terms.

21.03.2000
Internet Explorer: MSIE seems to have problems with (very) long lines. This feature leads to problems when users want to submit terms for OFD categories with a large amount of terms (genre, other crew, technical terms). This is reportedly true for MSIE version 4.72.3612.1713. The problem may or may not result in a HTTP error. Please let me know if you have similar problems.
Problem should be fixed now.

12.03.2000
Russian: I have received a huge amount of russian translations from Olga Serenkova. I am currently trying to find a proper solution to display the cyrillic terms on the OFD pages. Nevertheless I have already added the ASCII circumscriptions she has provided too.

05.02.2000
Updates: I am currently back to at least a monthly update. If you have waited really long for your submissions to appear on-line, please accept my apologies. I simply found no time to do the updates.

02.02.2000
Award: The OFD has been included into the Britannica Internet Guide.