David Scotson

I've been having a look at the more recent CVS code and update my list of possible and desirable changes that I'd like to see for 1.5

remove all font tags

I was kind of surprised to see these still here. They don't really affect the XHTML-ness of the code, but they generally send the wrong signal and are an accessibility problem. They fall into three broad categories, hard coded colors (e.g. red for error), hard coded text sizes, or hard coded fonts. It's a relatively simple mechanical task to get rid of them e.g. red color -> <em class="error">

remove all inline CSS using style="" attributes

I think someone objected to this when I mentioned it earlier. I really can't think of one good reason for doing this and the examples seen when running grep -R "style=" . should almost certainly all be rationalised and moved to the CSS.

remove reliance on config.php for defining colors

This needs only a few changes to the code here and there. The theme I've attached outlines these in bright purple. The main code is okay in this regard, it's just bits and bobs within the activities. To fix this more semantic HTML and id and class hooks for CSS need to be added to the unstylable sections.

remove all th, thead, tbody etc. tags that are not used for tabular data

This appears to have been done for the right reasons, but isn't really appropriate. See Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites Chapter 10: Tables and Frames, "what not to do" for more.

minimise the number of tables used for positioning

The theme I've attached also attempts to eliminate tables from the header (untested with Internet Explorer as yet, so it probably breaks horribly).

Basically you can't do that everywhere yet as several design decisions are hard-coded into the HTML and can't be overwritten in CSS. This will hopefully change in the next version.

However, it should be possible to change the text color for most headers without effecting the text color of the content. Could you post the CSS or styles.php changes you've made to give a better idea of what you're trying to do?

If someone wanted to sit down with a list of countries and create a map of coverage then they could take this blank political map of the globe from wikipedia and color the appropriate countries with any drawing package (all the countries have a 1 pixel border.

On Wikipedia's blank maps page they also have e.g. US and German states if someone felt that level of detail would be interesting to show too.

It would be neat if you could integrate at HitMap perhaps in a block (there are smaller maps). I've not looked into it in depth but I doubt it's rocket science. If you want one for your own website, sign up here.

WebCT: a major shift of emphasis, in International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

Abstract

The evaluation reports in this series usually feature several products at once. The current review, however, comes at a time when one of the most widely used (and expensive) online learning management systems is undergoing a major change in its marketing strategy and corporate focus. WebCT is currently evolving to a new version (WebCT Vista), with much attendant discussion by distance education (DE) users. The current review, as the others in this series, adds the DE student's perspective to this discussion. The review compares the existing WebCT Campus Edition with the new WebCT Vista, and examines some of the problems associated with the migration to Vista at the institutional level.

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Conclusions

With so many comparable open source softwares emerging for course management, containing more varied features than WebCT, one has to wonder: how long can such costly proprietary products survive? In the case of WebCT, the short answer to this is - possibly two years. If, as has been suggested, the vendor will no longer support earlier versions than Vista after 2006, it will either gather massive upgrade payments from many of its clients in the interim, or will lose them altogether to the new OSS systems. So is this WebCT's last attempt to make large amounts of money in the face of the growing OSS challenge, its last hurrah?