Consider Question and Answer as a role

[GeorgeKerscher]

In the reading system user requirements discussion on September 8, 2025, theissue of identifying Answers in a details element. It is common in textbooks that answers are provided in a details element following the question.

This raises the question if some kind of role is needed. We do have doc-exercise in DPUB-ARIA, and itseems like Question and Answer could be very useful.

I just wanted to put it out there.

[clapierre]

I was thinking the same thing George.
If we are thinking of a role for image description maybe a role for answer.

We already have
doc-qna
A section of content structured as a series of questions and answers, such as an interview or list of frequently asked questions.

[mattgarrish]

Pretty sure we proposed these for 1.0 and they got dumped. I can't remember now exactly why, but I think "answer" was too vague (is it the choices or the actual answer). I seem to also recall being asked why, if you were in a quiz or test, you wouldn't already know you were encountering questions and answers (i.e., when are these truly ambiguous and in need of roles).

For reading system use with educational testing, we were trying to expand on all the different types of questions in the edupub work, too. Question and answer roles are probably too generic for that case.

[mattgarrish]

For confirmation, I found this in one of the original drafts of terms:

question
The component of a self-assessment problem that identifies the question to be solved.

answer
The component of a self-assessment problem that provides the answer to the question.

[vincentml]

It may be useful to consider how Questions and Answer content is handled in other formats. In some publishing workflows there may be a need to transform Question and Answer content from these formats to EPUB.

• JATS & BITS https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/archiving/tag-library/1.4/chapter/q-and-a.html
• QTI https://www.1edtech.org/standards/qti