What is Hot Potatoes?

• The Hot Potatoes suite is a set of six authoring tools, created by the Research and Development team at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre.
• They enable you to create interactive Web-based exercises of several basic types.
• The exercises are standard Web pages using XHTML 1.1 code for display, and JavaScript (ECMAScript) for interactivity.
• These core W3C standards are supported by all good modern browsers, including Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla 1.2+, Phoenix, Safari, and many others.
• The authoring tools will also handle Unicode, so you can create exercises in virtually any language, or in a mixture of languages.
• You don't need to know anything about XHTML or JavaScript to use the programs.
• All you need to do is to enter your data -- texts, questions, answers etc. -- and the programs will create the Web pages for you.
• Then you can post them on your Web site or save on your hard disk/flash disk or even diskette.
• However, the programs are designed so that almost every aspect of the pages can be customized, so if you do know HTML or JavaScript code, you can make almost any change you want to the way the exercises work or to the format of the Web pages.