Other Tools

To some extent, Sousa re-invents a wheel. There have been many content authoring tools developed over the years. This page contains links and notes to other applications that Sousa might either leverage or imitate.

eLML

Frank Benneker writes:

An interesting application, Frank. It has several things going for it:

1. Well defined structure
2. Transformations to several standards including SCORM
3. Working examples
4. Good multimedia support

But then, there is the downside:

1. No authoring tool, authors must write in XML
2. No support for HTML (hard to escape in XML, BTW) (much can be done with CSS, tho)

It's not clear why the authoring tool is late. It was targeted for 2007. It's an interesting thought that Sousa uses XML for it's document structure. It might be possible to change Sousa's internal representation to the eLML format.

Other Notes

The XML format includes the following elements:

• The 'annotation' element (special - default=block)
• The 'box' element (block only)
• The 'citation' element (block and inline)
• The 'column' element (block only)
• The 'formatted', the 'indexItem' and the 'newLine' element (inline only)
• The 'link' element (block and inline)
• The 'list' element (block only)
• The 'multimedia' element (block and inline)
• The 'paragraph' element (block only)
• The 'popup' element (block only)
• The 'selfCheck' element (block only)
• The 'table' element (block only)
• The 'term' element (block and inline)
• The table of content 'toc' element (block only)
• All about alignment

The multimedia element supports the following:

• Picture (GIF, JPG, PNG)
• Flash
• Quicktime Video
• MPEG Audio/MP3
• RealOne (Audio/Video)
• SVG
• Java Applet
• VRML
• X3D
• MathML
• HTML or PHP

Code is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/elml/

The eLML contact is: Joel Fisler, leading developer of eLML. His e-mail address: joel.fisler@id.uzh.ch
If you contact him please say hi on behalf of Annette Langendijk. She is our "girl in the middle".