The support of my peers....

[tyggerjai]

So. My greatest recent professional triumph is writing a tool to parse, unpack, and present IMS Learning Objects. The parsing is the painful bit - they're really just zip files with webages (and often swf files) inside, unpacking is a breeze, but there's a manifest file, about which I have previously ranted, that's supposed to contain metadata about the contents. And the standard for that metadata is fucked - it allows bidirectional inheritance, inheritance from multiple nodes without a clear order of precedence, etc, etc, and strict adherence to the spec is not only (IMPO) impossible, but never gives clients what they expect or want anyway. So, since the spec *is* so vague, it all becomes an exercise in guesswork anyway. And, though that increases the pride I can take in having built a tool that works *at all*, it disturbs me, on some level I feel that surely, *surely* the IEEE and IETF know what they're doing, and the fault is mine ... right?

Hah. A recent survey of real-world LOM objects, designed to assess the usage of metadata in the field, had to be curtailed because most of the metadata sent in was not, in fact, parseable. The metadata that was parseable, or that the surveyors parsed by hand, was so far out of whack as to be useless anyway.

Vindication. I will wave this report in the face of the next product manager to ask how LOM support is coming along....

sol.
.