Semantic Markup in HTML

A few days ago I spotted an interesting link from the BBC about the use of semantic markup.

This page got me thinking again about something I blogged about on my Questionmark blog too.  One of the problems we experienced during the development of QTI was the issue of 'presentation'.  In QTI, the presentation element refers to the structured material and interaction points that make up the question.  However, to many people the word 'presentation' means the form of markup used at the point the question is delivered.

I always found this confusion difficult.  Clearly people don't present the XML markup to candidates, so the real fear was the QTI would allow Question authors to specify things that should be left open until the method of presentation is known by the delivery system.

For some people, using a language like HTML implies that you have crossed this line.  But the BBC page on using HTML to hold semantic markup is heartening to me because I think that QTI would be better bound directly into HTML too.

HTML has been part of QTI since the early days (when you had to choose between HTML and RTF for marking up material).  With QTI version 2 we made the integration much closer.  However, XHTML was in its infancy and work to make the XHTML schema more flexible through use of XML Schema and modularisation of the data model was only just getting going.  As a result, QTI contains a clumsy profile of XHTML transformed into the QTI namespace itself.

In fact, XHTML and XML Schema have not played so well together and HTML5 takes the format in a new technical direction as far as the binding is concerned.  For QTI, this may become a block to the rapid building of innovative applications that are also standards compliant.

But bindings are much less important than information.  I always thought that QTI xml would be transformed directly into HTML for presentation by server-side scripts or, if required, by pre-processing with XSLT to make HTML-based packages.  That hasn't really happened, so I thought it might be harder than I thought.

However, I did a little research and have had no difficulty transforming the simple QTI XML examples from QTI version 2 into XHTML 5 and back again using data-* attributes to augment the basic HTML markup.  I'll post the transform I used if there is interest.  Please add a comment/reply to this post.

Steve