Re: EARL-producing testing tool

> This is just a really rough draft for now, but I'd appreciate
> any help or ideas people had.  In particular, I'm not entirely
> confident about the EARL it produces.

First off, the script is wonderful. The concept is good, and
everything runs smoothly. Here are some general comments.

* In the EARL output, you seem to have got something a bit switched:-

<WebContent rdf:about="http://www.w3.org/">
        <testSubject rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/#name"/>
        <date>2002-02-13</date>
</WebContent>

the rdf:resource URI-ref needs to go where the rdf:about attribute is,
and vice versa. In fact, the hack of just adding the name to the end
of a test subject is... somewhat horrific, and was just a "make-do"
kinda thing in the ATR output. In fact, this breaks the EARL, because
two resources with different date properties will have the same
URI-ref.

What you could do is something like the following:-

<WebContent
rdf:about="http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~nadiah/tester/ns#http%3A//www
.w3.org/%20name%202002-02-13">
        <testSubject rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/" />
        <date>2002-02-13</date>
</WebContent>

it's not pretty, but it's fairly robust. Simply take URI+" "+name+"
"+date, and URI quote it. Alternatively, you could just use short
generated IDs, and keep track of them in a local database or
something.

* The predicates are wrong. In fact, EARL 0.95 only defines
earl:passes, and earl:fails. If you want to use "NotTested" etc.,
you'll have to compose them in the following way:-

<rdf:predicate rdf:parseType="Resource">
   <rdf:type rdf:resource="[earl]ValidityProperty"/>
   <earl:validity rdf:resource="[earl]NotTested"/>
   <earl:confidence rdf:resource="[earl]High"/>
</rdf:predicate>

(don't forget to change [earl] to the EARL 0.95 namespace as
appropriate!). This is a bug in the ATR output too. In fact, we'll
probably be re-jigging this to some extent for EARL 1.0.

* Perhaps you can use RDF for the test cases. Something like the
following syntax (in Notation3 [1]) would be cool:-

@prefix : <http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~nadiah/tester/ns#> .
<http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/test15.htm> :id "1.5" .
<http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/test16.htm> :id "1.6" .
<http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/test17.htm> :id "1.7" .

* http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~nadiah/tester/css.txt#1.1 has a
dubious fragment, although it doesn't concern me too much.

* [pedantic-mode] The form uses GET, but the frames hide that, which
is a shame. I don't think that's "fixable". Acutally, the form at the
end uses POST, whereas a long GET may well be acceptable, given that
the field names aren't all that long. If not, perhaps you could save
the results temporarily to the server (like the W3C's RDF Validator
does for the visual output), and give them a short ID.

* Please make the source code for the client public if you can, and
attach suitable licensing conditions

MUTAT is a cool name for the tool, BTW, although it feels as if it
needs an "N" added to it :-)

[1] http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://purl.org/net/swn#> .
:Sean :homepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2002 19:18:59 UTC