Offline Capable Lessons

The material provided here seeks to take a Software Carpentry (SWC) lesson approach to describing the process by which the standard SWC lesson style may be altered so as to allow for a lesson’s rendered HTML to not only be viewed using a webserver, but just also when using basic file:/// URIs, which we term an “offline rendering”.

As this lesson is unlikely to be given within an official SWC event, it also seeks to provide a template that allows for non-SWC branding (or perhaps SWC de-branding ?) to be applied, whilst maintaining the look and feel that people familiar with studying content from official SWC lessons will have become used to, as well as making it easier for content from within non-SWC lessons to be re-used withn official SWC material.

Those of you who think you may have seen this before are correct. This is a newer version of the work here: https://vuw-ecs-kevin.github.io/offline-capable-lesson/

This lesson is therefore “Alpha” in that the change history from the previous project lesson need to be applied to a more up-to-date Software Carpentry base.

It should also be noted that some of the suggestions from that previous work have since been incorperated into the Carpentry base lesson: but not all!

Prerequisites

This material assumes readers will have become familiar with the standard SWC procedure for creating standalone lessons and/or will be have access to a local copy (cloned or otherwise) of SWC lesson-templated source material, and the toolchain required to render the source material with a make site

Schedule

	Setup	Download files required for the lesson
00:00	1. Introduction	What issues does a Lesson being “Offline Capable” address? What content does a webserver serve when presented with a bare directory path URI? What URIs does SWC’s standard rendering of a lesson’s content produce as link targets?
00:00	2. Adding fully offline capability	How simple would it be to add “Fully Offline” capablity to the current style? What changes to the current style’s files would be required? What changes to a typical lesson’s content would be required? Would these changes prevent the existing behaviour from being produced if required?
00:00	3. Making more use of existing content	Can we reduce the number of external links even further, in order to make the lessons even more self-contained? What content does a checked-out lesson have that isn’t currently rendered into the lesson? Could we make more use of remote content that we have local copies of?
00:00	4. Some things to think about	Is there any room for improvement in the offline viewing experience? Why do some links still have targets that might be confusing?
00:00	5. Re/De-branding the lessons	Is there a way to stop people confusing our own lessons with official Carpentries material? Is there a way in which we can give the Carpentri credi where it’s due?
00:00	Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.