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Using Web Standards To Produce And Deliver Multimedia Presentations In An E-Learning Environment Other XML Format SMIL XSL Transform + The aim of this project was to explore whether W3C standard technologies can be used effectively to provide teaching content, particularly digital recordings of teaching sessions. MAPL Text Editor An investigation identified several candidate technologies, most notably HTML Slidy, SMIL and SVG. Converter / XSLT SVG MAPL Application HTML Slidy The powerful media playback control of SMIL combined with the high quality graphics of SVG, provides the most promising solution for recorded lecture playback. However, it is complex to author and does not provide semantic description of content. SMIL SVG A new language, MAPL, was created to address the shortcomings of this system. Using MAPL to create and store presentations enables users to produce a variety of W3C standard outputs through conversion software or XSL Transforms. (Figure 1) Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language is used to describe complex multimedia documents. SMIL is a modular XML language built around a core set of timing and layout elements. Structured Vector Graphics describe 2D graphics. SVG primitives can be combined to produce complex images. SVG utilises SMIL modules to perform declarative animation. Figure 1: MAPL Workflow Architecture W3C Standards MAPL Multimedia Academic Presentation Language is a semantically rich means of describing layout, content and timing of presentation slides and pre-recorded presentations. MAPL documents can be easily created by hand (figure 2), or they could be generated from another XML format such as OpenDocument using an XSL transform. Montreal is a Java tool that has been developed to convert MAPL documents into SMIL+SVG output. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <presentation xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:meta=”metanamespace" xmlns=”maplnamespace"> <head> <dc:title>A VERY Brief Guide to Unix</dc:title> </head> <body> <slide id="Slide1"> <title>Three Unix Facts</title> <textbox width=”full" height=”full" x=”west" y=”north"> <ul> <li>Unix is an operating system</li> <li>Unix was developed at Bell Labs</li> <li>GNU is <b>NOT</b> Unix</li> </ul> </textbox> </slide> </body> </presentation> Figure 2: A simple MAPL presentation containing one slide Andrew Hall ([email protected])