[ACTION] Warnings in EARL

Hi group,

In response to the action item recorded at [http://www.w3.org/2006/11/22-er-minutes.html#action03] the following is a proposal to include warnings management in EARL.

There was some discussion on the mailing list (thread starting at [1]) about the need to include additional validity levels to the EARL language or some extension mechanism which allows developers to express what people usually call "warnings". The discussion so far could be summarized as follow:

There was some agreement about the huge diversity of warnings people can found, and how each tool create its own custom warnings without any recognizable schema in common. This makes any effort to create "standardized" new warning validity levels almost vain.

It was also raised that all current uses of warning could fit in one of the EARL validity values:

- earl:pass
- earl:fail
- earl:cannotTell
- earl:notApplicable
- earl:notTested

The reason for this is that warnings could be seen more as "additional information" than as a new validity level, so it was suggested that we could use the generic dc:description property to store warnings.

The problem with the previous solution is that, even if we can see warning just as "plain text" messages, it would be interesting to have a way of automatically recognize and discover "warning messages" and distinguish them from other kinds of "plain text" messages.

A simple solution that do the work without big impact on the current EARL could be the addition of a new optional property to the Test Result that links to a new Warning class including the properties that are needed (e.g. description, instance, etc.), keeping the validity level as required in all cases.

For example a representation of typical CSS validator warnings could be as follows:

<earl:TestResult rdf:ID="result">
  <earl:validity rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/EARL/nmg-strawman#pass"/>
  <dc:title xml:lang="en">W3C CSS Validator Results</dc:title>
  <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal" xml:lang="en">
    <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
      <p>This document validates as CSS!</p>
    </div>
  </dc:description>
  <earl:warning rdf:resource="#warning1"/>
  <earl:warning rdf:resource="#warning2"/>
</earl:TestResult>

<earl:Warning rdf:ID="warning1">
  <dc:title xml:lang="en">Same color and background-color</dc:title>
  <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal" xml:lang="en">
    <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
      <p>Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts</p>
    </div>
  </dc:description>
  <earl:instance rdf:resource="#instance1"/>
  <earl:instance rdf:resource="#instance2"/>
</earl:Warning>

<earl:Warning rdf:ID="warning2">
  <dc:title xml:lang="en">Redefinition of property</dc:title>
  <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal" xml:lang="en">
    <div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
      <p>Redefinition of margin-bottom</p>
    </div>
  </dc:description>
  <earl:instance rdf:resource="#instanceN"/>
</earl:Warning>

<earl:PointerCollection rdf:about="#instance1">
  <earl:LineCharLenPointer>
    <earl:line>145</earl:line>
    <earl:char>1</earl:char>
  </earl:LineCharLenPointer>
</earl:PointerCollection>

<earl:PointerCollection rdf:about="#instance2">
  <earl:LineCharLenPointer>
    <earl:line>154</earl:line>
    <earl:char>1</earl:char>
  </earl:LineCharLenPointer>
</earl:PointerCollection>

<earl:PointerCollection rdf:about="#instanceN">
  <earl:LineCharLenPointer>
    <earl:line>193</earl:line>
    <earl:char>1</earl:char>
  </earl:LineCharLenPointer>
</earl:PointerCollection>

The questions now are:

- Does this proposal cover everybody's needs?
- Is there any use case where a warning messages could be treated as anything else than "plain text"?
- Are any additional properties necessary? (e.g a warning id)


[1] - [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-wai-ert/2006Oct/0036.html]


Regards,
 CI.
 
--------------------------------------

Carlos Iglesias

CTIC Foundation
Science and Technology Park of Gijón
33203 - Gijón, Asturias, Spain 

phone: +34 984291212
fax: +34 984390612
email: carlos.iglesias@fundacionctic.org
URL: http://www.fundacionctic.org

Received on Monday, 4 December 2006 17:56:36 UTC