AICC has been around for a while. AICC's structure has been defined by its history. To better understand AICC's structure, you need to understand its history.
AICC was initially designed for file-based communication (this explains its strange structure).
- Initially, AICC was designed to have courses played by an executable
A stand-alone program that plays on the student’s computer and stores results locally on the hard disk. At the end, the executable would transmit results to the server.
- This architecture allowed for local memory. This is a different paradigm than browsers (which have no local memory between sessions).
- With the arrival of the web, and ubiquitous use of browsers, AICC added a browser-based format for transferring information in the files.
- AICC decided to package the contents of the files into a web form as a "post"-ing