QZB
                      design thoughts v.2

QZB design  goal  is  to  have  portable  quiz  dataformat  and
lightweight quiz-browser at the quiz-maker's command.

QZB offers the following services:

1. Helps to organize problem-set banks by providing uniform and
portable open format to store problems. These problem-set banks
could be  anything  from  a  pile  of  miscelanious  individual
problems to a serialised quizes  with  elements  of  on-the-fly
task variation

2. Helps to prepare a definite quiz  (or  series  of  quizzes),
based on  the  problem-set  bank  and  joined  together  by  an
instructor into courses

3. Performs a quiz on a group(s) of students by  any  available
interaction  method  from  web-browsing  to  running  on  local
machine or making quiz by email.

4. Helps  to  analyse  the  results  of  quizzes  by  providing
statistics back to the instructor


The important thing is that QZB will have an open data  format,
allowing to automate the process  of  converting  quizzes  from
different systems into one storage system.

Not all of the above will be met with the first release of QZB.
I hope to make QZB as an object system,  abstracting  different
layers of code so that it will be easier to  add  new  servers,
interfaces and clients to the QZB engine.

At first, quiz will highly rely on  the  existing  HTML-browser
software to show data other than text.

The data format will be XML.

There will be three kinds of data:
 - individual problem description (.qpd)
 - quiz description               (.qzd)
 - problem-bank directory         (.qbd)