Using Standard Mark-Up in the Design and Development of Web Educational Software

In this work we address the problem of the design, development and maintenance of Web educational software. In our approach, the Web is conceived as a hypermedia system with “very long” links and the markup language as a tool that can capture the most essential features of an educational application. We think that beyond HTML, mark-up languages based on SGML can be used with a double purpose in the construction of educational software. First, to organize the content of educational applications in a standard machine readable form, and second to describe the structure of the application itself, including meta-information about educational decisions underlying the application. Main benefits from this approach include the formal description of “design documents” that can be easily created and modified by designers and clearly understood by programmers. Finally this paper describes how this approach has been applied to the construction of an educational application for teaching partial competence in a second language.