[bxmlt2005] Chris Hübsch: XQuestXML

Chris Hübsch, TU Chemnitz: XQuestXML — an XML grammar for describing questionnaires

Chris presents an XML based system for online questionnaires. This is not very exciting to be honest, but I like the talk anyway. Like Chris’ talk from last year (page in German), it’s a great lesson in how computer systems should be built: Evalutate your options at any step and pick the best tool for the job. Too many people (including myself) use the “If all you have is a hammer …” approach.

Make the questionnaire system web-based or not? Web-based, because deployment is cheaper and you can do world-wide questionnaires.

What client-side web technologies should be used? Only plain HTML, no Flash etc., because it’s universally supported and sufficient to solve the problem.

How to accept answers from the web form? A PHP script, because that’s the stuff PHP was invented for.

Where to store answers? CSV, XML, database? Database because it’s easy to add new records, and it’s easy to do stuff like counting and averaging.

How to specify the questions? TML, LMML, LConML, DocBook, XFDL, XForms? All have some problems, a custom format seems to be the best choice. That’s XQuestXML.

A bit of scripting and XSLT creates HTML forms from the questionnaire definition file, sets up the database including creating the answers table, and sets up the receive-answer and export-all-answers PHP scripts.

There’s a PDF export function to create paper questionnaires but apparently no one uses this.

There are a few extra functions like access restricted questionnaires, recording answer times etc.

The system has been used at the university for studies and for teacher evaluation. The scripts are available for download (site in German).