Sakaidelic Musings

It was announced yesterday to both the Resources WG and Pedagogy lists that the Resources Viewer aka Content Viewer is ready for QA.

After trying to get it working in 2.4 at the Conference, it's nice to finally see it in action. I think this tool shows that the whole approach to course resources is being rethought. I already know the main complaint users will have though: It's a little non-intuitive to add the descriptions and accompanying info to the items in Resources to see them displayed in the Viewer. Same goes for reordering the items.

Jim Eng mentioned that he believes the Viewer will one day become a tool for editing, as well as viewing, but I think limiting to read-only for scope reasons is not a horrible way to go.

Obviously, the Viewer still has some bugs, which are listed over on the project in JIRA. (You must have an account to see the issues.) Particularly, I'm interested in RSV-6, RSV-7 and RSV-14. I think those are the main deal breakers when it comes to including it our implementation of 2.4.

In the process of updating our skin for 2.4, I've (so far) come across two major skin changes.

The first is the removal of the 'a' tag from the selected tool in the toolMenu list. Pre-2.4, all the links on the left hand side were li > a > text, and the selected tab was li.selectedTool > a > text. However, the selected tab shouldn't actually go anywhere - it's specifically there to indicate where you already are. (I also think that's an accessibility requirement too.) So, it seems perfectly natural to remove the a tag and make the selected tab li.selectedTool > text, while leaving the other list elements the way they are. However...