Possible issue with actor format in example launch link.

[ryanrolds]

In lms_lrs.md the example lunch link may be invalid, or at the very least overy complicated.

http://example.scorm.com/TCActivityProvider/   
?endpoint=http://example.scorm.com/lrs/   
&auth=OjFjMGY4NTYxNzUwOGI4YWY0NjFkNzU5MWUxMzE1ZGQ1   
&actor={ "name" : ["Project Tin Can"], "mbox" : ["mailto:[email protected]"] }   
&registration=760e3480-ba55-4991-94b0-01820dbd23a2   
&activity_id=http://example.scorm.com/tincan/example/simplestatement 

It appears that the actor query string paramater is JSON, but it's not a valid xAPI actor as the values for name and mbox are arrays of strings instead of plain strings. Is this intentional or a mistake? IMO, it would make the most sense for those to be strings as then the actor could be used without a transform in the derived xAPI statements.

I look forward to your clarifiaction. Thank you.

[brianjmiller]

The launch guidelines were created at the time of the 0.9 specification and the actor JSON string represents a valid actor value for that version of xAPI (then Tin Can API). The guidelines were never an active specification, have not been peer reviewed, and have been effectively static since that version. There was (and is) too much active content and too many implementations to make a backwards incompatible change to the launch guidelines to match the 0.95, 1.0.x xAPI specification changes, so the transform is required to work with those versions. This document and implementation should be considered deprecated. For newer development cmi5 is a recommended approach for implementing packaging, launch, and scoring for traditional LMS content leveraging xAPI. Unfortunately adoption is still quite low, so YMMV. For more about cmi5 see http://aicc.github.io/CMI-5_Spec_Current/.

[ryanrolds]

Thank you for the information. Could a deprecation notice be added? I have an LMS citing the document.