Alex Little

We’ve been testing more of the sample UoLs and have found a little problem with the "Learning to listen to Jazz" UoL. The problem is when you view some of the resources from the environment menu tree (especially the results page) the tables aren’t formatted very well – everything is bottom aligned which makes it hard to read the tables – all seems to be happening with the ‘globalcontent’ pages.

I found that the reason was the xml file which generates this page (from the LD package) specifies all the table alignment as being ‘bottom’. This is fine in the CopperCore demo player because they then apply a stylesheet  just to this section of the page – which can be done because the CC player is all frames and windows, so the stylesheet doesn’t affect anything else – eg menus etc. If I try to add in the same stylesheet to the Sled player – since it is a complete single html page – this stylesheet affects all the menus etc, as no specfic classes are provided for. I think there’s a couple of ways around this …

1. Add classes to all the ‘standard’ elements, eg the menu and other layout, so that the globalcontent.css file doesn’t affect these
2. Try to find a way when so that when the globalcontent is transformed using xsl, this adds a class attribute, which is also then reflected in the globalcontent.css file – so preventing the design affecting any of the other elements
3. Find another way so the css is only applied to particular areas of the page – don’t know how feasible this is though – if it’s possible at all.

I think my preferred option is (1), but not sure if it will affect other things I’ve not thought about yet!

This also raises the question of how much of the design/layout should be included in the resource file (in the LD package) and how much should be left to the player – the content/design seperation and how much of the meaning of the content is contained in the design – but I’ll leave that argument for another day!