Building quizzes, assessments, and questionnaires in code often involves writing repetitive UI state logic and rigid database schemas.

To solve this, I created QMark — an open-source schema parser and CLI ecosystem designed to make quiz creation as clean and portable as writing Markdown.

🛠️ The Problem

When building dynamic questionnaires, developers usually face two friction points:

  1. Hardcoding quiz structures inside component state.
  2. Manually writing custom exporters for rendering results into PDF, SVG, or Canvas outputs.

QMark decouples questionnaire structure from presentation using a declarative qmark-compose.yaml file.

🚀 How QMark Works

The QMark ecosystem consists of two core packages published under @silverio-labs:

  1. @silverio-labs/qmark-core: A TypeScript core parser that processes and validates qmark-compose.yaml schemas.
  2. @silverio-labs/qmark-cli: A command-line utility for schema validation, formatting, and rendering.

💻 Quick Start & Code Example

1. Install Core Parser 

npm install @silverio-labs/qmark-core

2. Define a qmark-compose.yaml Schema 

version: "1.0" quiz: title: "TypeScript Fundamentals Assessment" questions: - id: "q1" type: "single-choice" prompt: "What is the return type of a function that never returns?" options: - label: "void" correct: false - label: "never" correct: true - label: "unknown" correct: false

3. Parse Schema in TypeScript 

import { parseQMarkSchema } from '@silverio-labs/qmark-core'; import fs from 'fs'; const yamlContent = fs.readFileSync('qmark-compose.yaml', 'utf-8'); const parsedQuiz = parseQMarkSchema(yamlContent); console.log(`Loaded Quiz: ${parsedQuiz.title}`);

🎨 Command Line Interface (CLI) & Exports

With @silverio-labs/qmark-cli, you can validate schemas and render outputs directly from your terminal or build scripts:

# Validate your schema npx @silverio-labs/qmark-cli validate qmark-compose.yaml # Render to SVG or HTML5 Canvas export npx @silverio-labs/qmark-cli render qmark-compose.yaml --format svg --out quiz-preview.svg

Try It Out & Get Involved
Playground: https://silverio-labs.com/qmark/playground

npm Packages:
@silverio-labs/qmark-core | @silverio-labs/qmark-cli

I'd love to hear your feedback! Have you built schema-driven tools before? What rendering targets would you like to see next?