by Nicola Dann
Our Technical Director, Tony, briefed us last week on HTML 5. HTML started life as a very simple language. It is constantly undergoing revision and evolving to meet the demands and needs of the growing Internet audience – we’re currently using HTML 4 to build our pages. Tony tells us that work is underway on HTML 5 and although it’ll be at least 3 to 5 years before it is extensively supported by the standard browsers it’ll have some interesting implications for our elearning technology.
Due to its initial simplicity, HTML included very few advanced features and so companies started to produce add-on programmes like Flash to fill the gaps. We’ve intentionally avoided using browser add-ons so that we can ensure our courses are accessible to everyone (for example some groups of learners that we work with are prohibited by their employers from downloading Flash onto their computers). However, the technology that we have developed still means that we can provide four key things to our clients and their learners:
- An intuitive and engaging learning environment
- Collaboration and communication tools to minimise the feeling of isolation
- Comprehensive and flexible learner management system
- An easy to use content management system
Our avoidance of plug-ins means that whilst others who are heavily dependent on them may need to redevelop their systems to use HTML 5 – it’s even possible that in time (perhaps 5 to 10 years) a growing number of corporate users will find that they don’t have Flash support on their PC – we’ll have the foundations to build an even better Imago without having to make any fundamental changes to our development strategies.
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