Battle For Open Standards In Dutch Public Education

In his first accepted submission, pjstevns writes "The heat is on! With the rising use of online systems for school administration the battle for open and accessible solutions is here, now. Parents are forced to buy 'proper' operating systems from your favorite Redmond based supplier — just to be able to access their children's grades, or participate in classes. A petition addressed at parliament for proper implementation of the open-standards guidelines put forward by the Dutch government itself is buzzing around the Netherlands. Comply or Explain!" It seems like a major supplier of education software in the Netherlands has written essential software in Silverlight that all students must use, claiming "...Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux," despite it more or less being non-functional with Moonlight.

Silverlight truly cross-platform? Right.

[mrjb]

Please hit them with a clue-bat at [e-mail]. This page on their website requires silverlight as well: http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Foldermateriaal/Magisterboek/tabid/615/language/nl-NL/Default.aspx [schoolmaster.nl] If you try installing the plug ins, you'll be redirected to the moonlight plugin. Which won't install because it is "not compatible with firefox 6". So in other words, it won't work on Linux. I wonder why am I not in the least bit surprised?

Re:Read the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I'm a closed-source, closed-minded Mac dev, not an open-source zealot, but to me that page doesn't look too complicated for a professional HTML designer (i.e. not the boss' teenage son). All I see in that screenshot are:

• a navigation bar across the top clearly using HTML form elements or their equivalent,
• a navigation list, just a single array in a given order, which could easily be a UL (unordered list) in HTML,
• a navigation outline, meaning an array with nested arrays at some nodes, which could be a UL of UL's,
• a calendar, which can be handled easily with TABLE elements or probably with DIVs by someone smarter than I,
• a table of students, which is just a TABLE element that can be rigged to sort with a bit of JavaScript,
• some buttons thrown into the mix, which have plenty of AJAXy solutions to make them do useful things without refreshing the page.

There is nothing in that UI that HTML5 couldn't replace. Neither Silverlight nor Flash is at all necessary here. This could run on practically any modern browser on any operating system, and with CSS it could easily have a separate view for mobile phones.