Captivate is merely one of the authoring tools available for creating slide-based e-learning content. The problems you are encountering are NOT the fault of Captivate. These are simply limitations that come with the territory when you are creating multimedia HTML5 content that you want to run seamlessly within a web browser.
The e-Learning world is moving over to HTML5 due to the demise of formats like Flash which will NOT be an option within just a few years or earlier. An e-learning module is really a miniature software project. Captivate removes a lot of the complexity. But if you want to play in the multimedia e-learning space in a professional capacity, then you need to become technically proficient in the technologies upon which it is built and on which it depends to run.
For the moment, if all you want is for people to review your content, and you are NOT building responsive e-learning, then you could potentially use the self-running EXE output from Captivate. I have used that extensively where I needed to allow management and reviewers to see the content in a non-web environment BEFORE it was uploaded to the LMS for wider distribution in other web-friendly formats.
Fair recommendations!
However, to be fair, I do not believe this is a fault of HTML5, but rather the result of how Captivate is composing its JavaScript (CPM.js, CPXHRLoader.js, etc.) and relying on JSON (img1.json, imgmd.json, etc.) at the local level to manage the construct of any given web app. Just wanted to provide some clarity as HTML5 has little to do with this!
Regarding the executable (.exe), it is unfortunately not an option with more-and-more of our publishers and clients switching over to Android/Mac based OS platforms.
Although this solves the technical stability of using the current output of the HTML5/JS capabilities of Captivate, it still proposes the following questions for some of the publishers reading this:
- Why does it work locally with some users and not others?
- Captivate will continue to enhance its usage of the JavaScript/JSON language(s), creating more opportunity for better handling of SPA's, local caching, etc..
- What does it work on my machine some of the time, then fail at other times?
- It's a roll of the dice when you're trying to run an SPA through a file path and not leveraging a (recommended) local server environment implementation (MAMP, Express.js, etc.).
Thanks for your time and explanation! I'll continue working with our publishers and helping them understand the technical limitations of SPA's and provide training on the benefits of hosting these projects with the intent of resolving these issues going forward.