DCHAS-L Archives, Oct 21, 2025 - [DCHAS-L] DCHAS-L Archives Update, Part 2 of 2, Mysteries Revealed

Continuing on the updates to the DCHAS-L archive:

1. A number of usability improvements. For example, inconsistent background color for links in the gray searchbox have been fixed. Search has been moved from the post or page to the universal searchbar in the main nav menu as described in the previos post.

2. But here's the real Neat Thing I had to do when I realized I could do it. In a previous post (below) I described the new improved Safety Demystifier at https://www.ilpi.com/msds/ref/demystify.html

So I figured to myself, hey, I should Demystify all those DCHAS posts because it isn't just us Safety professionals reading these things, anyone lacking any chemistry or safety knowledge can land here from a search engine. And now that the Demystifier is including more and more links to offsite content like OSHA standards, other agencies etc. this could really help that audience.

But then I figured that wouldn't be fair to the original post and its author as it might disrupt the message. And certainly most of us DCHAS'ers don't need a link to the word chemical or ventilation to explain it. Still, it would be cool if there were two versions, but that would mean duplicating 23,000 files and maintaining them (plus the search engine cost and duplicated content ranking issues). And while I could put a button on each page to send the content to the Demystifier, that's still a bit inconvenient and the DM is not designed for readability. And that's when it hit me...so, instead....(drum roll)

I put a Demystify button on each post in the archive that will apply the Safety Demystifier to the page content on the fly. Toggle it on, there is a brief flash and a sound to give you feedback that something happened and now whatever terms the Demystifier knows have become hyperlinks. Toggle it off and the page goes back to its original state. So, picking two pages completely at random, try it out here: https://www.ilpi.com/dchas/2014/20141118.html or here https://www.ilpi.com/dchas/2014/20141024j.html

Now, not all pages will have a match or only a handful. But what is really cool here is that I now have 23,000 different documents to look at and say to myself, gee, we should really have a link to content on "piranha solution" or "foreseeable emergency" or any other number of terms that can be added to the Demystifier, either as external links or new internal content in our SDS HyperGlossary.

So there you have it. Constructive feedback is welcome!

Best wishes,

Rob Toreki

PS: In case anyone wonders how this magic is accomplished, I use JavaScript to grab the post content (which meant marking the position of that in all 23,000+ files), invisibly open a new Demystifier window, simulate a click on the Demystify button, grab the output, and inject it back into the position of the original page content - no reload required. I can get away with this because the two pages are on the same server. Browser security doesn't let you grab the contents of a window from site A and give it to site B because it's a horrible security risk called a Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability - think about having your 401K account open in one window while visiting a malicious site in another, for example. So this trick doesn't work if you were to put a Demystifier button on your own web site. But an upcoming project of mine will enable you to highlight text on another web page and send it to the Demystifier for output there, which is still pretty cool.

On Oct 2, 2025, at 9:24 PM, Info <info**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com> wrote:

I have been hard at work coding a new version of the SDS-Demystifier which I am now renaming more generally to the Safety Demystifier. Check it out! https://www.ilpi.com/msds/ref/demystify.html

If you haven’t seen it before, this resource takes your pasted text or HTML, scans through it and replaces any terms it knows with links to our extensive SDS HyperGlossary or direct links to OSHA.

This is so much more powerful and improved over the previous version which ran as a server application. Some of the features you’ll find in the new version are:

1. Runs completely in your browser as JavaScript. No server interaction required.

2. It’s FAST. I ran MIT’s Chemical Hygiene plan through it and it took about 2 seconds.

3. The anchor text of the inserted link (e.g. the blue underlined part you click on) will now match the case of the original text.

4. *Much* better about respecting word boundaries. It won't, for example, replace the 'air' in 'stairwell', but it will in 'fresh air'.

5. No practical limit on the length of the document it can process.

6. *Fantastic* performance and experience on mobile devices.

7. It now autodetects whether you pasted HTML or text. And it respects existing anchor links without disrupting them.

8. Replaced the old pages with a sample MSDS and it’s output with a simpler link that puts sample input into the Demystify box so the user can see it in action instantly.

9. Three new ways to save your output. You can save the output HTML to the clipboard (and it gives you audio and visual feedback when you do that), You can save the output as an HTML file. And you can now save as PDF and the links in the output file will be live clickable links (for PDF’s made with most browsers, anyway).

10. This one is so cool - it now defaults to link to only the first occurrence of a term in a given chunk of text (paragraph or list item). So if “chemical” appears five times in a paragraph, only the first one will be a link. it makes the output much more readable without a ton of superfluous duplicate links.

11. But sometimes you may want all those occurrences to be links, so now there is a Verbose mode toggle. You can link to every term every time. And you can toggle between the two versions in real time. Give that a try with the trial text and watch as extra links appear and disappear as you toggle Verbose on and off.

12. A Neaten HTML feature which is on by default. Legacy documents often contain a surprising amount of pointless white space that make editing or reading the HTML a bear. This option strips all those, puts spaces between paragraphs, and indents list items for easy readability in the HTML source. But if you want to keep your original formatting, simply toggle it off.

13. The instructions are now in a collapsible subsection. So you can see them if you need them and hide them if you don’t. This makes the page much more readable, particularly on mobile devices.

I can’t stress enough how powerful this thing is and how much careful coding went in to avoid substitution collisions. At first glance, one might think it’s just s simple find and replace loop. Noooooo. It’s not. Parsing freeform text with technical terms and regulatory references and then all these bells and whistles took me the better part of the past two weeks and required a couple hundred lines of code to address all the issues this involves.

Another aspect of this tool is that it will be a great help as we add new content to the HyperGlossary and Interpretations sections in the near future. Moreover, it’s modular so when we decide to do LOTO or Bloodborne Pathogens, it’s as easy as making a new dictionary.

Feedback is welcome!

Best wishes,

Rob Toreki

LabLocks™ - The first device that can lock out standard laboratory ball valves: https://www.safetyemporium.com/07400
US-Made NIOSH and FDA-approved N95 respirators: https://www.safetyemporium.com/safety-items/respirators/

Safety Emporium - Laboratory and Safety Supplies
https://www.SafetyEmporium.com
esales**At_Symbol_Here**safetyemporium.com or toll-free: (866) 326-5412
Fax: (856) 553-6154, PO Box 1003, Blackwood, NJ 08012

On Sep 18, 2025, at 5:12 PM, Info <info**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com> wrote:

Just a heads up that we were in the midst of converting our various SDS/safety resources, DCHAS archives and more to a new unified interface w/ breadcrumbs, more modern design, more mobile friendly, https secure, more reliable version to run in the cloud when our ancient, creaky, deprecated web server that we hosted in-office died a sudden and tragic death after a 15+ year battle with obsolence over the weekend.

So we pushed out this update a bit before it was ready for prime time, but it’s mostly good. Other than some minor cosmetic issues and web pages that need some work deep in our annotated version of OSHA interpretations on the HazCom standard, most everything works. The notable exceptions on that for the moment are that search is not working yet and the software magic behind the MS-Demystifier has to be recoded. We hope to resolve most all of this by the end of the month.

The SDS Hyperglossary section got a good once-over on maintaining and checking the thousands of links it contains, as did other sections: https://www.ilpi.com/msds/ref/index.html All told, we have somewhere around 800 pages on HazCom.

We did a slight reorg and changed the main SDS landing page, putting the list of sites to look for SDS’s on the Internet on its own dedicated page.

The Demonstration Safety page is keeping vigil for more incidents: https://www.ilpi.com/safety/demosafety.html

DCHAS Archives: https://www.ilpi.com/dchas/index.html - the new and improved search that’s coming will make it easier to find pertinent results. And once this migration is done I can look into bringing the archive up to date. At the moment there are over 17,000 posts in that section. Long-term plans are to include an FAQ or may just some AI summaries of common questions. We also have to automate a way of going in and deactivating the dead links in the Archives. Link rot is the bane of a large collections like this.

We’ll be adding some more recent OSHA HazCom interpretations and changes once everything is all settled, as well. Another nice outcome is that we’ll be more flexible to adding new external resource links to our pages based on information discussed on DCHAS-L as we’re not trying to spread ourselves across two versions anymore.

Thanks for all for your support and encouragement in building this trove of resources over the years.

Best wishes,

Rob Toreki

LabLocks™ - The first device that can lock out standard laboratory ball valves: https://www.safetyemporium.com/07400
US-Made NIOSH and FDA-approved N95 respirators: https://www.safetyemporium.com/safety-items/respirators/

Safety Emporium - Laboratory and Safety Supplies
https://www.SafetyEmporium.com
esales**At_Symbol_Here**safetyemporium.com or toll-free: (866) 326-5412
Fax: (856) 553-6154, PO Box 1003, Blackwood, NJ 08012

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