SCORM security (two kinds of SCORM people)

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I’ve had a flurry of emails and messages regarding my SCORM cheat the past few days, and have received feedback from a number of well-regarded SCORM aficionados, some of whom contributed to the standard and helped make SCORM what it is today. This is wonderful, I’m very happy to hear from everyone, especially regarding such an engaging topic.

But as I hear more from these seasoned SCORM pros, I’ve made (what I believe to be) an interesting observation: there is a sharp division between die-hard SCORM developers and casual users. I suppose I’ve felt this way for a long time, but it’s really coming into focus this week. Let me try to define the camps.

Cheating in SCORM

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I’m always surprised how little people talk about cheating in e-learning; maybe it’s a fear of revealing just how easy it can be. The fact is, SCORM — the most common communication standard in e-learning — is fairly easy to hack. I’ve whipped up a proof-of-concept bookmarklet that when clicked will set your SCORM course to complete with a score of 100 (works with both SCORM 1.2 and 2004).

Gotchas in Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is at Release Candidate 1, which means it will be released very shortly. IE8 is a brand-new browser and will represent a considerable shift from IE7/IE6; it will follow standards more closely and will offer much improved CSS 2.1 support. However, because of some of these changes, it is also widely understood that IE8 might ‘break’ websites that have relied on IE-specific hacks targeted at previous versions if Internet Explorer.

Constructive criticism for the new whitehouse.gov

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The new whitehouse.gov site has received a lot of press since its unveiling a few days ago. Many have rightly given it kudos for bringing a modern sense of design and “Web 2.0”-style social practices to the White House. I agree that the new site is a big improvement, but upon looking under the hood, there are a number of things I’d have done differently. Here’s a quick-hit list (not comprehensive at all)…

SCORM resources

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I recently emailed a shortlist of good SCORM development resources to a colleague, and figured I should probably post a list here, too. This is a quickie list, and I’m sure I’m leaving someone out. If you know of any resources I’ve missed, please add a link in the comments. This list is presented in no particular order.

Fixed-width layouts

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While working on a recent web project at work, I wondered if I should go for a fixed-width layout or stick with my preference for fluid layouts. Fixed-width layouts are certainly easier to manage, but they just feel so… rigid. With the boom in larger monitors, I also wondered if fluid sites start presenting a problem due to being too wide. I decided to check around the web to see what others are doing.

Dealing with Internet Explorer in your JavaScript Code

It’s almost the end of 2008, and thanks to the hard work of web standardistas, browser vendors, and JavaScript framework developers, cross-browser JavaScript code is much less of an issue than it used to be. Even Microsoft is feeling the love — the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 will be a (mostly) clean break from legacy Internet Explorer releases and will behave much more like Firefox, Safari (WebKit) and Opera. …And they rejoiced.

So why is it that when I look under the hood of some recently produced web pages (learning management systems, courses produced by e-learning rapid development tools, general web pages, etc.), the pages’ JavaScript often includes incredibly out-of-date and bad-practice Internet Explorer detection?

Here’s a quick rundown on the dos and don’ts.

Introducing PDFObject

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I recently worked on an e-learning course that required embedding some PDFs into an HTML file. PDF embedding piqued my curiosity, and has become something of a pet project. I decided it would be nice to have a JavaScript script that could dynamically embed PDFs as easily as SWFObject allows SWF embedding. I managed to whip up a script, and decided to name it PDFObject. (I know, I know… what a creative name!) As you may have inferred from the name, the concept and functionality is pretty similar to SWFObject.