RE: Suites and metadata

comments inlined 

-----Original Message-----
From: Arnold, Curt
To: 'www-dom-ts@w3.org'
Sent: 2001-07-09 22:09
Subject: Suites and metadata

I had deferred doing anything with test suite 
definitions, but it seems like things are progressing
to the point that we will need to address them shortly.

I think that it is fairly obvious that we will have a <suite>
element.  What goes underneath is not so clear.

<suite>
   <!-- conditions and metadata prolog like test  -->
   <metadata>...</metadata>
   <test href="characterDataSubstringIndexSizeNegative.xml"/>
   <test href="characterDataSubstringIndexSizeTooLarge.xml"/>
</suite>

is attractive, but would complicate DTD validation since <test>
is already defined with a different content model, <member>
would also be out for the same reason.

Any comments on:

<suite>
   <suiteMember href="..."/>
</suite>

or 

<suite>
   <suite.test href="..."/>
   <suite.suite href="..."/>
</suite>

[dd] suiteMember sounds better to me, allows both suites and tests.

Also, I had been using XML/RDF represent extracted metadata from tests
and 
other sources though the test themselves only had RDF reminiscent
elements
and adding a dependency on a technology that none of us seem to really
know well was not popular.

The only construct that was really missing from the existing <metadata>
construct in the test definition language was the ability to say that
a metadata element was about some arbitrary URI instead of the test or
suite that the metadata element was contained it.

It would seem that we could express subjects.rdf and some of the other
external metadata files within the internal metadata, if we add an
optional about attribute to the <metadata> element and allow a
<metadata>
element to optional contain other <metadata> elements.

That would not affect metadata in the tests, but it would allow external
metadata compilations (which are now in an RDF format) to be validated
by the DOMx.DTD.  For example, subjects.rdf which now looks something
like:

<rdf:RDF ...>
   <rdf:Description about="uri to some passage in the DOM spec">
       <dc:description>some text</dc:description>
       ...
   </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

could be expressed as:

<!DOCTYPE metadata SYSTEM 'dom1.dtd'>
<metadata>
    <metadata about="uri to some passage in the DOM spec">
        <description>some text</description>
    </metadata>
    <metadata about="...">
        <description>...</description>
    </metadata>
</metadata>

The resulting file could be trivially converted to RDF by a transform
if that eventually added any value.

I'd appreciate any feedback and will try to make appropriate
changes when I commit the spec-to-xsd.xsl and spec-to-dtd.xsl 
transforms to the W3C CVS tonight.

Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2001 13:15:04 UTC