HDSL An e-education Hypertext Document Structuring Language

Henri Delebecque (1)

1 SUPELEC-Campus Gif

The development of a set of educational web pages is a complex task, because it involves multiple abilities: to be a good content author, a graphist, an ergonomist, following the advice of the webmaster. Moreover, this task has to be redone every time an author (or the academic site in which his pages are included) change the graphical or the navigational appearance. Last, you cannot use the advanced mechanisms of HTML (which can help in managing styles and content), since they are not fully supported by most frequently used web browsers. Our goal is to propose a language to be used by professors, helping them to structure the content of their hypertext pedagogical documents, and to free them from all the other aspects. The definition of a set of web pages is done by describing both a structural model (using our HDSL language), and a graphical model (using completely normal HTML). Using this pair of models, our HDSL engine will build automatically the XSL conversion sheets able to convert any of the documents built using the structural model into (for example) web pages using the most currently accepted HTML. HDSL also offers capabilities of inheritance between structural models, which allows a professor responsible of a whole pedagogical web site to define a look and feel for it, and derive it according to the needs of the various authors writing the hypertext supports of their courses. Moreover, the HDSL engine is able to accept presentation models in specific languages other than HTML, such as PDF, WML,…starting from the content of a single document.

Domaines: Web; Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain; Multimédia [cs.MM]

Henri Delebecque. HDSL An e-education Hypertext Document Structuring Language. EDMEDIA 2002, 2002, Denver, United States. ⟨hal-01848844⟩