Re: Experiments With Abbreviated EARL As An Authoring Tool

On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

> I noticed that 95% of EARL uses the same fraction of features that EARL has
> to offer:-

This kind of observation applies to many things:-)

> but nevertheless the XML representation of this is too verbose; it puts me
> off, let alone newcomers:-

That's down to RDF, innit?  Without that, we can be much briefer.

> [[[
> <EARL xmlns="http://infomesh.net/2002/earlxml">
> <Assertor name="Bob Bobbington" email="mailto:bob@example.org" >
>  <asserts Language="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11" date="2002-06-15" >
>    <fails id="http://www.w3.org/TR/xag#cp2_3"
>        label="2.3 Use XLink and XPointer"
>        note="It was an architectural decision" />
>  </asserts>
> </Assertor>
> </EARL>
> ]]]

That seems to lose much of the structure of the original>

> Not only that, but in about half an hour I had produced an XSLT sheet that
> can convert the abbreviated syntax into XML RDF.

In principle, that's what Valet is doing.  It generates XML that
expresses its findings, and uses XSLT to transform it to formats
such as HTML and EARL.

> So there you have it. If anyone finds this useful and wants me to come up
> with some sort of schema for it (check out the transformation for the basic
> semantics of the abbreviated form for now, or ask me), I may cobble one
> together.

Not sure about that.  I wouldn't use it directly, because it doesn't
express valet's internal workings (at least, not now).  But if it
could express the two-part test definition + test application problem
discussed in my last post, I'd seriously consider working towards it.

-- 
Nick Kew

Available for contract work - Programming, Unix, Networking, Markup, etc.

Received on Saturday, 22 June 2002 19:01:33 UTC