5. Practicability vs. sustainability?

It has often been stated that large platforms offer the best solution to ensure sustainability of web-based material. This is mainly due to the fact that these platforms are professionally supported and developed. The development of course material for these platforms, however, needs to be made outside of the platform, typically using an HTML editor. More recently, the use of Content Management Systems has allowed bypassing this step, often with strong limitations in the layout possibilities.

The solution of working from Word files has several advantages regarding the durability of the produced material, however. Considering that the program itself has been widely available for more than 10 years, and that it is controlling a large share of the market, it is likely to remain a strongly supported product for many years. More importantly, the nature of the material produced, mostly text and figures, carefully tagged using paragraph styles, is already an halfway XML document. Indeed, the macros developed within the project could easily be modified to produce XML code, and this has been envisioned as a development for future versions.

In the same manner, the target “platform” of the macro could be changed to accommodate other environments than the current custom-developed support environment based on PHP scripts. This way, the authors are assured that their material will remain available and editable (not only for use on the Web) in the future, but also that it will be possible in the future to port it to other publishing environments without excessive work, more specifically, without any additional work from the authors. The only persons involved in the adaptation to a new environment would be programmers working on the translation process from tagged Word documents to HML pages, a rather simple and well defined task.

This approach was initially chosen by the project because it greatly simplifies the translation of material from one language into another (the lessons will be prepared in a least three languages): the person translating the material most likely also uses Microsoft Word, and only needs to translate the material while paying attention not to alter the applied paragraph styles. This is a simple task that allows separating the process of translation from that of web publishing.

What is the trade-off from this approach? As in all standardized systems, it is clear that some special layout features from HTML are not supported, and thus that the layout will need to follow the rules defined within the style sheet. This can also be seen as an advantage, because it leads to a greater consistence in the presentation of the material. Authors and graphic designers are involved in the definition and development of the feature set to make sure that most desirable features are implemented to reach a pleasing and efficient interface. The result can be seen on the i-structures site at https://i-structures.epfl.ch

Readers interested in seeing firsthand how the Word document looks, and what the output of the conversion is can look a at a web version of this article at the address https://i-structures.epfl.ch/articles/authoring-1-01_e.asp

The Word version of the article is also available for downloading: https://i-structures.epfl.ch/articles/authoring-1_e.doc