RE: Some draft code for mobileOK Basic Tests RI

> 
> The proposal here is to produce an intermediate XML representation of
> the test state -- the document, headers, CSS, image formats and any
> errors encountered, parsing errors, encoding problems. From there, I
> bet you could XSLT-transform this into test results. The goal is easy
> portability, since XSLT and XML are quite cross-platform.

Right, portability plus extensibility.

> 
> But the hard part, the heavy lifting is of course producing that
> intermediate doc. Implementing code that produces this intermediate
> representation seems like it can't be done in a language-neutral way.
> There are some details here like wrestling with encoding and image
> formats and CSS that can't be described by a transform.
> 
> Given that, I don't yet see the value in the additional code and
> performance overhead needed to generate the intermediate document. It
> may save a little bit of additional code, but, it's the code for the
> easy part, like running some XPath queries.
> 
Well, I'm not clear what additional code is involved? You need to do all
the (pre)processing anyway, so why not just serialise the results of
that processing as XML. That makes the information available not just to
the mobileOK Basic tests but also to some aspects of mobileOK (full) and
to other ad hoc tasks.

> 
> I think any kind of prototype is great at this point as we knock
> around ideas. Prototyping the bit that produces this intermediate XML
> document seems like the most crucial next step for that approach. We
> probably want to define an XML format for the test results too.

Agreed with that, but I guess as part of a decision making process. We
do need to come to a conclusion in a reasonably timely way. So, what do
we need to know and in how much detail do we need to know it?

Just to repeat dotMobi's invitation to discuss all this F2F in Dublin.
If we could assess willingness to attend, timescale and agenda, then I
think that would frame prototyping and other preparatory activities ...

Jo

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2007 20:17:36 UTC