Picture of Rob Mausser
Ill say it: Json kinda sucks for this use case
by Rob Mausser - Wednesday, 18 August 2021, 5:01 PM
 

I love Adapt, but JSON is a really bad choice in my opinion for presenting learning content. 

Multiple paragraphed text with bullets, special characters etc, becomes a mess. 

This is why HTML was invented, its a markup language and you can still have your presentation text in a typical format with markup around it. 

I'm wondering, how does everyone deal with long complicated paragraphs etc in Adapt. Is there an alternative to json that would be better? Perhaps even Body text could be dealt with on a separate html page with ID's that use ajax to inject that html back into the correct areas within json. Etc. 

 
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Picture of Paul Hilton
Re: Ill say it: Json kinda sucks for this use case
by Paul Hilton - Wednesday, 18 August 2021, 6:03 PM
 

You could use the authoring tool? 
Free demo from our website if you need a hosted service?

https://canstudios.com/adapt-authoring-toolkit/premium-authoring-package/

 

 
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Picture of Chuck Lorenz
Re: Ill say it: Json kinda sucks for this use case
by Chuck Lorenz - Wednesday, 18 August 2021, 6:56 PM
 

I've experienced that pain before. Years back I had a framework project that involved a lot of text formatting, including bullets in tables--all done to reproduce the look of the company's official manual. I remember producing the html content in another text editor (something like https://html-online.com/editor/) and then pasting it into the Adapt JSON. But those incidents for me, luckily, have been few.

If I understand you correctly, the pain is related to the framework, isn't it? The text editor within the AT produces html from the wysiwyg editor. The pain I feel when using the AT is the default subset of permitted tags and attributes is small. But that can be overcome by a server admin adjusting the config file.

 
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Picture of Tom Taylor
Re: Ill say it: Json kinda sucks for this use case
by Tom Taylor - Wednesday, 18 August 2021, 7:12 PM
 

The simple answer is that HTML is a markup language, and JSON is a data format; HTML is purely for structuring a web page and telling a browser how it should be rendered, while JSON is used to represent data that's then parsed/manipulated via code. Adapt wouldn't get beyond static web-pages if there was no structure to the data.

As a side-note: there's nothing stopping you from creating static HTML and including that in your Adapt courses if that's what you're looking to do.

 
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Picture of Simon Date
Re: Ill say it: Json kinda sucks for this use case
by Simon Date - Monday, 23 August 2021, 11:47 AM
 

I use this resource to help with formatting - https://wordhtml.com/

 
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Picture of Oliver Foster
Re: Ill say it: Json kinda sucks for this use case
by Oliver Foster - Monday, 23 August 2021, 5:14 PM
 
Archive (ZIP) json_converted_to_xml.zip

> I love Adapt, but JSON is a really bad choice in my opinion for presenting learning content.
> This is why HTML was invented, its a markup language and you can still have your presentation text in a typical format with markup around it. 

XML used to be the default choice for e-learning as far as I understand.

There are effectively two parts of the framework where JSON is loaded and can be swtiched to XML or similar. src/core/data.js - where the data is loaded into the course at runtime, and the grunt/ folder - where data is checked for structure and used in the build process.

You're more than welcome to make a pr to allow Adapt to switch between JSON and XML. Deciding on how to structure the xml might be somewhat of a challenge. Persoally I find the extra characters a bit mind blowing.



 

 

 
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