BenToWeb's Test Case Description Language

Hi All,

As promised during the telecon, I'm sending info on BenToWeb Test Case 
Description Language (TCDL) to the list.

TCDL is an XML language (not RDF) with five major sections
* formal/administrative metadata (title, author, date, rights, ...);
* technologies (technology in the sense defined by WCAG 2.0), a section 
that describes the specific features (e.g. HTML elements and/or attributes) 
related to the pass or fail statement for the related SC;
* "test case", a section that describes the purpose, the required tests 
(especially for end-user evaluation) and test files involved;
* "rules", a section that refers to the related success criterion (or WCAG 
1.0 checkpoint, etc);
* namespace mappings (for XPath statements used in the "rules" section).

TCDL implements all of the QA IG/WG's Test Metadata 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-test-metadata-20050914/) except
* Contributor (not relevant to BenToWeb, but TCDL has elements for 
describing borrowed materials and test files), and
* Grouping (because grouping is something that happens at a higher level 
then the individual test case).

A RDDL file for TCDL 1.1 is available at the namespace URI: 
http://bentoweb.org/refs/TCDL1.1/.
The XML Schema is available at 
http://bentoweb.org/refs/schemas/tcdl1.1.xsd; it contains rather detailed 
documentation.

There are a few issues about using TCDL 1.1 "as is":
* the schema contains a few constraints (e.g. on the date field) that are 
specific to BenToWeb but not to other potential users;
* we have sometimes made small changes to the schema, even after publication;
* the current schema is not extensible.

To overcome these issues, I am working on a new schema ("TCDL 2.0") that
* contains no constraints specific to BenToWeb, so it can be used by anyone;
* contains several extensibility elements and extensibility points that 
allow you to add elements to your own TCDL file while still staying valid 
against the TCDL 2.0 schema.

One last thing: the TCDL schema imports a few other schemas hosted at W3C 
and elsewhere. When batch validating large numbers of TCDL files, it is 
important to use catalogs so that the validator uses local schemas instead 
of those on the Web. If your validator downloads the same schema more than 
500 times within a minute from the W3C web site, your IP address gets 
blocked. (See http://www.w3.org/Help/abuse-info/fast-reqs.html. Please 
don't ask how I found out about this.)

Regards,

Christophe


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on 
Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/ 


Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm

Received on Wednesday, 26 July 2006 14:50:59 UTC