[kde-edu]: Learning vocabulary on the road / Questions about KVTML2

[Michael Hofer]

Hello!

I didn't follow the kde-edu developments for a long time and was
positively surprised when discovering Parley in KDE4. While it's still a
bit rough around the edges, I think Parley is a big step forward in KDE
vocabulary programs and has the potential to become one of the best
vocabulary programs overall. Thanks to the whole KDE Edu team for
providing such good programs!

One bit I found missing in Parley, is the ability to print vocabulary on
flashcards for learning while on the road / not in front of your
computer. While this might be possible with some XML/XSLT magic, I went
to save some trees and did it another (better?) way: Since I had to
learn JavaME anyhow, I started to develop a small JavaME program for
mobile phones which loads KVTML2 files and displays the entries for
learning. The project is hosted at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobvoc/ . I will release a first usable
version in the next days and announce the release here.

While analyzing the KVTML2 files (produced by Parley 0.9.0 released with
KDE 4.0.0), a few questions arised:

- There are some elements in the XML, that do not appear in the DTD
published on http://edu.kde.org/kanagram/kvtml2.dtd . Are these the
first signs of a new format (KVTML3) or is the DTD just out of date? Are
there more changes to the XML planned for the near future (or already in
the SVN version)?

- When I first read through a KVTML2 file, I thought that the "id"
attribute of the translation correlates to the "id" attribute of the
identifier (language). But when I change these IDs, the language mapping
in Parley doesn't change. In fact, the mapping appears to depend only on
the order of appearance in the XML file. Is this the supposed behaviour?

Thanks for you help,
Michael