Notes on EARL and mobileOK Basic test results

We reviewed the results document format today, and reviewed using the
EARL RDF vocabulary to express it. I believe the general consensus is
that yes, we will use EARL and it meets our needs. I note three key
points we discussed on this topic:

1. Warnings
EARL has a notion of "info" messages for test results, but not
warnings. This is on purpose. mobileOK Basic tests may generate both
informational and warning messages which must be distinct. We decided
to add our own RDF subclass of "info" representing a warning for our
purposes. Problem solved.

2. Assertor
We discussed at length the need to report the mobileOK Basic test
implementation and version used in the test results. EARL explicitly
supports this. We also discussed a need to report the versions of
various subcomponents in use by the implementation (e.g. Xerces 2.0,
Java 5.0, HttpClient 3.1beta). EARL also supports this via Compound
Assertors.

3. Schemas
There is no fixed XML schema for EARL, as it's RDF-based, but for our
simple application of EARL it would be possible to write a schema
describing how we express the test results in RDF. So, we should do
that too, to give other implementations an example to follow.

Sean

Received on Monday, 2 April 2007 16:17:47 UTC