Re: Why EDUML?

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 08:07:28PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote: 

> > It is unecessary to struggle for pure EDUML applications.  However, it 
> 
> This sentence sounds weird to me. Are you saying that it's not necessary
> to design applications with eduml in mind from the beginning, because we
> can do modular format translators?


In a fit of humility, I realized that it is not worth spending energy 
advocating applications that work directly in EDUML:

1. what matters is that ALL educational applications that save info about 
student achievement will need to convert their data into EDUML (and having a 
handful of applications that won't need to do that because they use EDUML 
natively is not going to change the fact that many converters will need to be 
written)

2. if EDUML is a worthwhile native storage format, then it will beget many 
native EDUML applications.  I think EDUML's fortunes as a native format lie in
XML's own fortunes;  if and when XML becomes a standard way to save data in 
all (new or revamped) applications, then naturally EDUML will make more sense 
to educational software developers.

3. it might be that in a matter of months (I can't see it at this point 
though), some other educational XML will become a de facto standard, and if 
we are comfortable with it, we may adopt it instead of EDUML. Converting from 
one XML to another is relatively easy as far as conversion software writing 
goes.

Bruno

p.s. sorry for the URL confusion

http://cran.seul.org/~vernier/eduml/eduml.xml