- From: Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
- Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:31:56 +0100
- To: Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com>
- Cc: public-xml-er@w3.org
On Feb 27, 2012, at 17:23 , Noah Mendelsohn wrote: > On 2/27/2012 10:50 AM, Robin Berjon wrote: >> First, it seems potentially hard to test. With XML there are clearly >> defined WF/non-WF distinctions so that you can feed parsers a large set >> of WF documents and a large set of non-WF documents and those that pass >> do the right thing for both. > > Really? Where is the correct output for an XML processor specified in the > case of well-formed input? That's exactly my point: the XML Recommendation > doesn't specify that, and therefore it's been successfully used as the > basis for many different processor specifications. I understand that much Noah, and yet there are test suites that test XML parsers. Clearly there are some conventions for success/failure to parse there, since they're not testing API-level interpretation. I'm merely pointing out that these success/failure conventions cannot work with a processor that only knows success (except when it crashes, which isn't a conformance issue). My understanding, and please tell me if I'm wrong, is that your use case is to make it possible to have more than one API/interface based on the same core specification. If that's correct, what I'm saying is that we can build the specification to one API, and *still* make it possible (and efficient, useful, etc.) to have other APIs (or more broadly interfaces) layered on top of it. And not only will it be possible, but it will be easier to specify and test, and more conducive to alternative processors that can interoperate properly. This does not mean that they'll have to build a DOM, but it does mean that they'll be able to define themselves using a common language — something that was rather painful in the XML world before we all started using the Infoset and then the XML Data Model. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon Coming up soon: I'm teaching a W3C online course on Mobile Web Apps http://www.w3devcampus.com/writing-great-web-applications-for-mobile/
Received on Monday, 27 February 2012 17:32:25 UTC