AJAX in SCORM content

Question

I'm new to SCORM, I'm planning to implement an export-to-SCORM feature. Currently, playing the content (which is not a SCORM player) is like a small HTML5 web app, and as part of its implementation, it uses features like AJAX for example to lazy load some files (JS files, CSS files).

I was thinking to just have a way to use the same player code when creating the SCORM course.

Are SCORM courses required to work offline or from disk?

If that's the case, using the techniques, like the lazy load I described above, won't work.

I imagine there could be some SCORM player mobile apps which store and load SCORM course on the device and a web-server is not available so that AJAX could work. (Or are these mobile apps actually implementing a local web-server within themselves in order to play the SCORM content?)

AFAIK, SCORM 1.2 or 2004 doesn't specifically put any restriction whether AJAX could be used in the presentation layer of the SCORM content, but in practice, when content is played in a player it obviously matters.

Answer 1

SCORM courses are not required to work offline or from disk (depending on what that means), which isn't to say they can't. SCORM courses are expected to load the initial resource from the location that they've been imported to, so while AJAX to a different location could work there are issues with security (credentials can't be secured or trusted), 3rd party loading, etc. Unless you were going to AJAX back to the loading host to retrieve content shipped with the package which should work and there are mechanisms that can be used to increase security for content retrieval.

The one offline implementation of a SCORM player that I'm familiar with (Rustici Software's) requires the packages to be all inclusive because there is no web server available. Again, that isn't to say that it couldn't be implemented with one, just that I'm not aware that such a thing has been implemented.