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Newsreaders display of categories



Title: Newsreaders display of categories
Thanks all for the input on my previous post.

I was thinking further about this question of eLearning and quizzes.

Basically, I want to use a weblog to build a quiz and RSS to display the content.

I don't know much RSS 1.0 and maybe this protocol could help. I'll try to catch up and
next week I plan to buy Ben Hammersley book (I'm not so good at reading specs) and
further my reading on RDF.

Here's my question.

In NetNewsWire, when you look at a headline, you get, depending of the type of RSS a
couples of columns.

I'll take for example the Burningbird RSS which is based on RSS 1.0 and use for defining topics the Dublin core.

In NetNewsWire, this look like a spreadsheet or a table.

Burningbird Headlines | Date | Creator | Subject

When I click on the Date header column, I can see a view by most or least recent posts. When I click on a the Creator or Subject headers, I can see a view ordered by alphabetical order (ascendent or descendent).

Now to get back on my problem.

What I'd like to display in the headlines headers in the newsreader is this:

Quizzes Headlines | Category | Ident | Position | Material


Quizzes Headlines = questions
ex. What is the capital of Canada?

Category -> type of description which can be question | response | condition | resource

Ident -> Since each quiz is a RSS channel, each quiz can have up to 10 questions, so each question/response are grouped (i.e. question1, response1 # 1, response1 # 2, etc...)

Position -> the position of the response in the responses listing.

Condition -> The correct response (i.e response1 # 2 is the correct response)

Material -> type of the description: image | sound | html snippet

Resource -> If the question need to display html | sound | image
So, if your are following me, here's an example of what I'd like to see in a newsreader:

Quiz Geo  GT60    | Category | Ident | Position | Material
------------------|----------|-------|----------|---------
Canada's capital? | question | 1     | 0        | mattext
Washington        | response | 1     | 1        | mattext
Ottawa            | response | 1     | 2        | mattext
Paris             | response | 1     | 3        | mattext
2                 | condition| 1     | 0        | mattext
France's capital? | question | 2     | 0        | mattext
Washington        | response | 2     | 1        | mattext
Ottawa            | response | 2     | 2        | mattext
Paris             | response | 2     | 3        | mattext
3                 | condition| 2     | 0        | mattext

Why use RSS and a newsreader at all. Well, its a long shot, but the interface for weblogging is getting easier and easier. And RSS is a protocol implemented all over the place. The people that will use what I'd like to build are not geek, but I think that they can easily grasp the concept. I know that I could parse myself any html to get this representation in a web page. But I rather use existing tools.

So, does RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 need to be modified to be able to have that kind of format. Can the newsreader support easily that kind of format?

Cheers
-Emmanuel
-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Emmanuel Décarie / Programmation pour le Web - Programming for the Web
Radio UserLand/Frontier - Perl - PHP - _javascript_  <http://scriptdigital.com/>
Blog: <http://blog.scriptdigital.com> - AIM: scriptdigital