on EARL

ref: http://www.abou-zahra.net/shadi/w3c/wrapper/outline.html

here are some comments i have about EARL:

1. EARL versions
considering the fact that there are already two versions of EARL, a
dedicated earl:version attribute would be very helpful so that a
consumer tool can determine if it has the capability to process the
input. currently the only possibility is to look at the namespace value
but in my opinion that is a hack.

2. location specification
even though the earl:subject attribute might describe a tested DOM
*element* fairly well (eg.
"http://www.example.org/page.html#html[1]/body[2]/img[1]"), in many
cases a cursor to the specific location within a *file* (eg.
<earl:cursor row="23" col="15"/>) might be more appropriate, for example
if the consumer is an authoring tool that needs to point an end user to
that location.

3. test case nesting
having child/parent relationships for test cases might be very helpful
in understanding the assertions and possibly making a judgment on
severity and importance of a failure or success. for the tool i am
trying to build such a description would also allow me to align
assertions conducted by different assertors without getting into any
tools specifics.

4. multiple messages
an assertor might have a lot to say about a conducted test but not
everything might be equally important to the end user depending on their
role. being able to tag an earl:massage with a priority or similar might
be useful for flexibility.

to put it all together, here is what my imaginary EARL code would look
like:

<earl:Assertion rdf:about="http://example.org/#assertion-1">
  <earl:subject
rdf:resource="http://www.example.org/page.html#html[1]/body[2]/img[1]">
    <earl:cursor row="23" col="15"/>
  </earl:subject>
  <earl:result rdf:parseType="Resource">
    <earl:validity rdf:resource="&earl;fail"/>
    <earl:confidence rdf:resource="&earl;high"/>
    <earl:message priority="0">malformed element in line 23</earl:note>
    <earl:message priority="2">hint: it looks like the element is
missing its closing brace</earl:note>
  </earl:result>
  <earl:mode rdf:resource="&earl;automatic"/>
  <earl:testcase rdf:resource="&wcag;#tc-1">
    <earl:testId rdf:resource="http://example.org/MyTestCaseThingy-1"/>
    <earl:test-type ns="&wcag;/standardtypes/html"
name="img-well-formed" type="syntactic">
      <earl:parent-test-type ns="&wcag;/standardtypes/html"
name="element-well-formed" type="syntactic"/>
      <earl:related-test-type ns="&wcag;/standardtypes/html"
name="img-src-uri-exists" type="semantic"/>
      <earl:related-test-type ns="&wcag;/standardtypes/wai"
name="img-has-alt-tag" type="syntactic"/>
    </earl:test-type>
  </earl:testcase>
  <earl:assertedBy rdf:resource="http://example.org/#assertor123"/>
</earl:Assertion>

regards,
  shadi

Received on Sunday, 6 April 2003 20:19:31 UTC