We’ve been trying to adjust to the new web lab, and have noticed a few irritations. First is that the preview panel no longer updates to automatically show the page that students are working on. They have to manually enter the page, there isn’t even a dropdown that we can find. This one actually feels like a bug.
Second is, I suspect, not a bug, but a purposeful change. Typing a tag and using autocomplete for it doesn’t actually complete the tag, you have to manually enter the final arrow. And then it automatically adds a closing tag, which causes a lot of going back and forth and copy pasting.
We’ve been able to adjust to the autocomplete issues, but the preview panel is super irritating. Is there a solution for this, or are we stuck with it?
@jmcintosh1, Are you using it as a standalone or as part of a course? I’m not quite sure what you mean by the preview panel no longer updates to automatically show the page that students are working on.
When I use the new weblab as part of a course, the panel displays information for each activity and when I move to the next activity, it has been updating, but I’m sure I’m just not quite understanding which panel or what you mean by it not updating.
The autocomplete works great if you are coding the full page from scratch because you finish the opening tag and it autocompletes the closing tag, and your cursor is in the perfect spot to type the element, however, if you are just fixing code, I can see your point. You type the opening tag and it immediately inserts the closing tag and you have to delete it and move to the correct spot to insert it. I’m not sure there’s a perfect way to do that. When coding fresh, it’s great. When updating, not so much. It does the same thing in CodeHS and it’s just something we have been dealing with on both Code.org and CodeHS.