Improving World Wide Web educational uses promoting hypertext and standard general markup language content-based features

• Authors: Baltasar Fernandez-Manjon;Alfredo Fernandez-Valmayor
• Venue: Education and Information Technologies
• Year: 1998

Behind the characteristics that make use of the WWW easy and attractive lie the hypertext and standard markup languages (HTML--SGML), metalanguages for defining the syntax of markup languages. The fundamental principle that makes it possible to share information through the WWW with independence of environment, is based on the standard encoding of documents. Most current educational applications do not fully exploit the flexibility offered by what lies at the core of the WWW, the language HTML. A discussion of different taxonomies of educational uses of the WWW is followed by the presentation of an alternative taxonomy that aims to reflect the contribution of HTML. This is a double classification that distinguishes between the educational context, where the innovation brought by the WWW is mainly technological, and new contexts promoted by the WWW that could not exist without it. From this it is possible to envisage two lines of future work. First to analyse the educational possibilities offered by the current definition of HTML and to propose ways to use them in particular applications. Second, to provide the specifications and requirements to develop instructional tools to make use of the educational possibilities of the language. An example of the latter is provided by the developmental work being undertaken to provide language support as part of a Socrates--Lingua project. This has led to the conclusion that the present definition of HTML is insufficient for the organization of all the data required in educational applications. Instead an extended markup using SGML is recommended as the way forward for designers