Crossing the Ts and Closing the Tags: Improving Web-Standards Compliance in Open Source e-Learning Platforms

In this paper we argue that Web-standards compliance of open source e-learning platforms is an important issue which has to be thoroughly addressed. The draft evaluation of randomly selected open source e-learning platforms, against usability and accessibility standards, resulted in an unexpectedly high failure rate for the validators employed and eventually set the basis for the examination of learning management systems with respect to Web-standards. In an effort to improve the level of Web-standards compliance, we attempt to identify the type of the usual mistakes, along with their origin, and suggest appropriate solutions. More specifically, we attempt to classify the errors according to the alleged origin source by testing demonstrative installations of e-learning products as provided by their developers. In the first part we discuss in theoretical level the way in which contemporary content management systems affect the web publishing process, as opposed to the static hypertext authoring of the past. In addition, we argue in favour of Web-standards compliance especially in the case of e-learning platforms. In the second part, which is oriented to practical solutions, we examine, in a per e-learning platform basis, characteristic examples of code fragments which fail to comply with Web-standards and we demonstrate the appropriate solutions. An important part of this section is the distinction between the errors found in the original source code, which should be attributed to the developers and the errors found in the markup code of the content, which should be attributed to the user who provided the content. The contribution of this work is bi-fold: At the theoretical level it examines the importance of Web-standards with respect to open source e-learning tools and argues in favour of compliance with the established standards in order to enhance usability and accessibility for the benefit of end-users. At the practical level it provides examples of solutions to the most common errors observed in the evaluated platforms and proposes the implementation of techniques that improve Web-standards compliance. The main conclusion, reflected in the title of the paper, is that most Web-standard compliance failures can be easily avoided by the use of well-known techniques and practices already established. In the modern hypertextual environment, "closing the tags" and following the Web-standards seems to be, more or less, the equivalent of our childhood's "crossing the Ts and dotting the Is"!