[kde-edu]: kvtml is a begin, but it can be better: flashcard/dictionary file standardisation for the whole desktop

[Peter Hedlund]

On Thursday 20 May 2004 05:11 pm, Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Having a look at your wiki I see that the formats actually used now are:
> kvtml, xml and ASCII
> kvtml is a xml subset and we plan to improve it now that KWordQuiz replaces
> FlashKard in kdeedu.

The main problem, I think, is that the "market" is really quite small. I've 
had WordQuiz on the market for Windows for seven years, and the number of 
users is not very large, probably a few thousand at the most. It's true that 
I charge money for this program which may be part of the story. I have also 
licenced the program to about 20 schools.  Still, the program has a top 
rating whenever reviewed.

Most flashcard programs are written quickly by students to suit their 
particular need and then abandoned when they don't need it anymore, and noone 
is asking for it. Such projects are probably not interested in dealing with a 
complex cover-everything file format.

You don't really say what you find missing in kvtml. Images and sounds are the 
most obvious to me. But then there is the problem of how much information on 
how the data should be displayed that needs to be stored. Things like fonts, 
column widths, row heights, colors... And then there is scoring information 
like number of times asked, number of correct, number of errors... The list 
can get quite long.

How interested are really teachers? A few get very enthusiastic, but I think 
many still don't like to use computers, and most seem to see flashcard 
programs as extra work. Or?

I like your idea and will try to help, but don't expect a large crowd all of a 
sudden. As with most things in open source, you have to do it yourself to get 
it done. Maybe try to keep your list of active projects up-to-date and 
constact the developer(s) on each project to try to get them to support each 
others formats and then gradually merge towards a common format.

As a simple transfer format I have today added the ability to KWordQuiz to 
read and write csv-files.

Thanks,
Peter