Ray Morris

> issue 5, is partially asking about issues i had come up when install a few hundred third party plugins.

Installing hundreds of different plugins is likely to cause problems with any system - Moodle, Wordpress, Joomla - any system.  Remember the one and only way to be sure that a module doesn't cause a security problem or some other major issue is by not installing it.  You might consider installing only the plugins you have an actual use for.  Any module you install costs you - it costs you performance, it costs you reliability, and it costs you security risks.  So for each, ask yourself "is the benefit I get from having this module greater than the costs?"  There are always costs.

Thanks for that improvement. I do think it is "subtle" in that I'd estimate 99% of users don't know whether or not it already works that way.  They ask for random questions, they get random questions and never think about how multiple attempts by the same student relate to that.

> I think that that is not any worse than the way it works now, and arguably it is better.

I think that part, repeating the same question in the same quiz when you ask for four questions and only have one, is clearly worse.  I think that when there is an error (asking for 4 questions yet providing only 1 is an error), there should be an error message letting you know that there is an error.  I would bet that it could be avoided with a small change to the code, so you're considering how many times the student has _previously_ seen the question, rather than mixing the current attempt in with that.  However, it's not a high priority to me so today I'm not going to go looking at the code and trying to offer a specific suggestion on how to "fix" it in order to "properly" inform the user of the error. Instead I'm going to go work on code related to importing questions, which is a higher priority.

In one organization I'm involved in, one of our fundamental principles is that those who do the work are the ones who decide the details of how the work is done.  Very few people would volunteer to be micromanaged.

> Because you have to use <span> tags, you can't just tag who blocks of content. You have to almost tag each line of text which makes for a lot of tagging

That's an important improvement implemented by both filer_multilangsecond and by my suggestion.

> Would it not make more sense to use display:none instead of visibility:hidden?

That's what I tried at first, but it doesn't work because the logic is:

Don't display multilang content.

Unless it's the language we want (en, en-us, or default).

So we'd have a rule like:

.multilang[lang~="en-us"] { display: block; }

or is that:

.multilang[lang~="en-us"] { display: inline; } ?

Maybe:

.multilang[lang~="en-us"] {display: inline-block; }

or:
.multilang[lang~="en-us"] {display: table; }

Since "display" isn't a boolean on/off value, we can't use it - we don't know what the correct "yes, display this" value is.  Let me know if you think of any way to invert the logic and have it work in all major browsers.

I'm fairly certain it isn't going to be measurable.  You are of course free to try to measure it, I just don't think you are likely to have any success. Yes, a class selector is slower than an id selector. Right now, there are about 10,097 rules class selectors in the CSS.  Some are fast, some are slower. We're talking about one more class, with three rules. I don't think it'll be measurable whether it's three faster rules or three slower rules.

Suppose you have 11,000 people in a stadium.  You want to weight the stadium, then add one more person and weigh the stadium again and try to detect the difference.  I think it doesn't matter whether you add a skinny person or a fat person, you're not going to notice any difference by adding one person to a stadium that already has 11,000 people in it.  Not even if you add a REALLY fat, 160 kg person will you be able to notice by weighing stadium with a million kg of people in it. Feel free to try to come up with a way to measure that, I just don't think you're going to have any success.  Let me know if I'm wrong and you're actually able to get consistent measurements.

Ryan Sanders wrote:

That happens to be the HTML standard decided upon by the World Wide Web Consortium six years ago, and almost what my suggestion implements.  It's similar to / compatible with what Moodle has been using, but not exactly the same.  Maybe someday will choose to do that.  To do that, the CSS would be something like:

*[lang]{visibility: hidden; height: 0px; width: 0px; }

*[lang~="en-us"],*[lang~="en"]{visibility: visible; height: auto; width: auto; }

*[lang~="en-us"] ~ *[lang] {visibility: hidden; height: 0px; width: 0px; }