SJ gave me a heads up recently, and quite timely, about the need to discuss what formats we can support on the XS and the XO.
My high level goals are that 1 - Local teams are able to include enormous amounts of gorgeous content coming from untold number of sources on the XS and XO. The teams handling deployments get to pick and choose content from many sources repositories repositories. 2 - The content is in such a format that we can serve it from the XS to XOs (and other clients) and we can also provide it as a bundle (or similar) so you can download it to the XO and take it with you. 3 - What we do is interoperable with the rest of the world as it exists. (ie: use established standards) In general, this means that we need content to be in the simplest, most standard formats possible. Project Gutemberg clearly gets this. ASCII, HTML, PNG, SVG and DublinCore metadata are my friends. Super-simple package formats based on them (think IMS-CP) make me happy. The XS is going to grow a "browse-and-download library content" leg sometime soon. It will be a facility that knows how to unpack and index the IMS-CP and SCORM metadata (which is all DublinCore stuff), and it'll be transparent to users how to browse, search and use any such content placed on the XS. It's about the content. No special client software, no special server software. This levels the ground for all the projects -- so you don't need to worry that your outrageously fantastic content won't be used because the player ain't sexy. Local teams don't have to worry about the burden of a particular content requiring special software. Teachers don't have to worry about the confusion of a different content player. My plan is to make that XS feature so that it can also automagically make a bundle for the XO to download -- after all, happiness is a warm bundle ( http://blog.laptop.org/2009/01/13/happiness-is-a-warm-bundle/ ) :-) This also means that XS and XO can leverage the large existing pools of IMS-CP and SCORM content. And that any content you prepare for OLPC, you are also preparing for the world... That's my plan at least :-) -- no plan ever survives contact with reality. cheers, m -- [email protected] [email protected] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff _______________________________________________ Library mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library
