RE: attribute-value-selector-004.xht not well formed

The rule is in 5.8.1 "Attribute values must be identifiers or strings." Also Appendix G requires that "attrib" be an IDENT and an IDENT cannot start with a number. IDENT is defined as ident which is -?{nmstart}{nmchar}. nmstart cannot have a number because it is required to start with a [_a-z]|{nonascii}|{escape} Maybe this case also have a help link for Appendix G as well.

Ahh, that is the key about testing correct implantation. We are testing an unknown implementation. We cannot assume that it is correct or not. The tests tell us if the implementation is correct or not.

Look at it this way. What if an implementation accepts and stores the '1badattr' attribute? And is also accepted the attribute selector as well, if it does that then the selection will most likely happen. This is a valid test scenario. This could in theory happen if and implementation does not properly handle IDENT's correctly.

I think the real problem here is that the case tests a valid scenario but we don't know how to handle it because it's invalid XML. This will not be the only case like this CSS, HTML and other specs require tests that fall into this category. The grammar rules from Appendix G almost require that half of your tests test invalid code in some way.

I have currently all cases that fall into this invalid category are marked with an 'invalid' flag. Maybe we should come up with a specific flag for this specific type of exception where the case is invalid and is also not valid XML. I think we should accept the fact that we may have a few cases like this and handle the few as exceptions. This I think is our first candidate as an exception.

--
Thanks,
Arron Eicholz


-----Original Message-----
From: public-css-testsuite-request@w3.org [mailto:public-css-testsuite-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of L. David Baron
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 10:16 AM
To: public-css-testsuite@w3.org
Subject: Re: attribute-value-selector-004.xht not well formed

On Tuesday 2009-03-10 10:06 -0700, Arron Eicholz wrote:
> This rule is in Chapter 5 which is specifically about selectors
> and selection.

*Which* rule?  And how can you possibly test for it given that any
correct implementation is going to throw the rule out anyway?

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Tuesday, 10 March 2009 18:00:40 UTC