Re: Some draft code for mobileOK Basic Tests RI

On 2/6/07, Roland Gülle <roland@7val.com> wrote:
>
> > In this case I think James's idea ref XPath would work, perhaps in the
> > context of an XSLT.
> >
> > So I guess a question is: could one define the mobileOK reference
> > implementation as an XSLT, given sufficiently strict definition of the
> > preceding steps?
> In my opinion: yes.
>
> Transforming structured data with an XSLT (instead of validating
> against a schema) is a great choice to generating a context sensitive
> feedback.

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.

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.

I could sure be convinced, that's just my take at the moment. I may
have misunderstood the proposal.


> The feedback (of course, XML) could be interpreted with your
> preferred program language (or with another XSLT to generate a HTML
> output).

I think it definitely makes sense to make results available as an XML document.

> If I could help with a prototype, let me know.

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.

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2007 19:24:36 UTC