JMDb lessons 2 & 3 - was kanji crib-sheet?

[Mark D. Roberts]

Roger,

> Can someone help me further, please?  For example, I'm trying to  
> find how many candidates there would be for 'Musume', shown in  
> Paris in 1926.  IMDb miraculously says there was only one - ever.   
> But  if I put ? into JMDb, I seem to get every title that has ?  
> anywhere in the title.  Can I limit it ?

I'm not sure about JMDB's own search engine, but it has a page that  
lists all films from 1926:

http://www.jmdb.ne.jp/1926/a1926.htm

You can do a plain-text search through that for ? and advance one-by- 
one through the titles.

Another trick is to use Google and add "1926" as a required element,  
e.g.:

	? +1926 site:jmdb.ne.jp

You can limit it further to pages that actually describe films like  
this:

	? +?? +1926 site:jmdb.ne.jp

These are general tricks for filtering results from Google, but for  
your question, the 1926 page at JMDB might be easier. I'm not sure  
how to filter google results for substrings in the page title or the  
URL. That would be very handy.

> The other thing is - why do some pages consistently come up as page- 
> code, and others come up in Japanese?  If I click on ? on Gosho's  
> list, I just get code, but other pages are in Japanese.  Is this me  
> or JMDb ?

It's JMDB, not you, and I agree that this glitch really annoying.

It seems that during an early phase of JMDB's evolution, the pages  
being added were not properly-tagged HTML. Newer pages include a  
proper META tag to tell your browser how to read the page, e.g.:

	<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">

Many pages in JMDB need this tag but don't have it. If you have a  
Japanese-language OS, the browser just defaults to that and it mostly  
works. If you don't, then the browser just defaults to whatever your  
OS encoding is (usually ISO 8859-1) and the page looks like garbage.  
You can manually switch the encoding in the browser, but then you  
must switch it back to read any other page. It's a real pain.

The maintainers of JMDB need to fix this. It should not be difficult.  
They just need to write and run a script across all the files in  
their database. The script is not complicated, but only somebody with  
access to the JMDB server could actually do it.

HTH,

Mark

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