Re: What is a subject of a test?

Shadi Abou-Zahra wrote:

>>Test case: validates against referenced DTD
> 
> 
> This is a very broad "test case", I suspect most validators would
> execute several smaller tests to validate this.

I only know one SGML validating component: opensp. Internally it may 
perform smaller tests. But you can only create EARL from what opensp 
tells you.

> This comes back to the
> "evidence" discussion. For example:
>  <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wai-ert/2005Mar/0035.html>
> 
> 
>>Version 2 looks strange to me because the machine-processable 
>>information (testCase, subject, validity) are the same and only the 
>>(human-readable) message differs.
>>
>>Would it be necessary for the EARL spec to clearly define how to do
> 
> that 
> 
>>in order to make interchange of EARL reports possible?
> 
> 
> Yes, I think you are absolutely right that we need to clearly define
> this situation in the specification.
> 
> However, it seems to me that the description of location within the
> message part of the assertion is not an ideal approach because it could
> not be processed automatically anymore. Maybe we would need more than
> one "location" attribute or even multiple "subject". We should discuss
> this.

Proposal:
Assertion
   |- testCase: HTML 4.01 Strict
   |- subject: document URL
   |- result
      |- validity: fail
      |- message
      |  |- location
      |  |  |- line1
      |  |  |- column1
      |  |- text: image lacks alt attribute
      |- message
         |- location
         |  |- line2
         |  |- column2
         |- text: image lacks alt attribute

>>As said earlier, whether you can specify an XPath is not a matter of a
> 
> 
>>document being well-formed. Well-formedness is a terminology of the
> 
> XML 
> 
>>world. An HTML document cannot be well-formed, because it is not XML. 
>>But it is possible to identify nodes with an XPath, because you can 
>>create a DOM document.
> 
> 
> My understanding is that XPath does not define what a parser should do
> for non-wellformed documents. This means we would be left with the mess
> of different parser interpretations and implementations of how they
> handle DOM. Do you have more information on how well XPath parsers
> support DOM, especially how interoperable these implementations are?

If XPath can only be applied to XML documents, it can not be a way of 
locating within most of the web content, which is not XML. The XPath 
spec reads
   "The primary purpose of XPath is to address parts of an XML [XML]
   document."

Apache's XPathAPI (in Xalan Java version) uses DOM nodes - from XML or 
HTML documents. Maybe someone can share information about more XPath 
implementations.
-- 
Johannes Koch - Competence Center BIKA
Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT.LIFE)
Schloss Birlinghoven, D-53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany
Phone: +49-2241-142628

Received on Thursday, 31 March 2005 09:59:59 UTC