RE: ECMA harness

Hi Dimitris,

My comment could take on several meanings, depending on the design of
the test harness.  Originally, I meant that there should be an option to
only run the tests that match the capabilities of the client in
reference to HTML-only implementations and implementations that do not
support exceptions.  This is consistent with discussions that took place
early on in the development of this test suite.  I'm not proposing any
modularization other than that.

Depending on the implementation of the harness, we could also provide
ways of running only certain portions of the test suite, based on the
needs of the user.  The current NIST harness provides some basic
functionality by using a SELECT control to specify the "DOM Category"
and another SELECT control to specify the "DOM Interface."  The test
case selection process could be made better.  I've attached a *sample*
of what this could look like.  (THIS IS ONLY A MOCK-UP!)  In addition,
running the suite would be automated, or at least take less time for a
person to run the conformance suite.

Flexibility in test case selection would lead to more useful reporting.
Users would only get back the information they desire instead of sorting
through test case areas that don't concern them.  Also, the results
would be posted on a single HTML page (or XML file?) instead of
requiring the tester to visit each interface, record the results, and
move on to the next interface.

-Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Dimitris Dimitriadis [mailto:dimitris@ontologicon.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2001 12:23 AM
To: Jason Brittsan
Cc: Mary Brady; www-dom-ts@w3.org
Subject: Re: ECMA harness

Hi Jason

Please provide a more detailed account of what this would mean; running 
different parts of the test suite? Have different test suites built to 
begin with in accordance with existing browser capabilities? Currently 
we haven't limited the suite in any other way than defined by the DOM 
specification, except for entity exapansion and whitespace preservation 
in parsers.

In order to come to an understanding about the harness thus: how should 
we act in this matter? Should we modularize the test suite in some way? 
We have discussed this in the past, and given the fact that we want to 
release the test suite as soon as possible it seems a good idea to make 
this explicit very soon.

In our previous discussion though, we decided to go for using a 
modularization that stayed as close as possible to the DOM 
specification. On the other hand, we obviously want to be able to run 
the test suite in all major browsers. IE can be tested running the Ecma 
tests with the JSunit framework by running ant dom1-core-gen-jsunit to 
build the appropriate code.

/Dimitris


On Monday, November 12, 2001, at 02:32  PM, Jason Brittsan wrote:

> Hi Mary... my apologies for not responding sooner.  Today is my first
> day back from vacation.
>
> Of course, I will be happy to provide any assistance I can with the
test
> harness.
>
> The test harness should be able to run tests based on the capabilities
> of the client.  Therefore we need to support this in the harness UI.
>
> I believe that flexibility in reporting is our best strategy.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mary Brady [mailto:mbrady@nist.gov]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 8:39 AM
> To: www-dom-ts@w3.org
> Subject: ECMA harness
>
> In building the ECMA harness, I have started with the original harness
> that was provided from the NIST web site:
>
>     http://xw2k.sdct.itl.nist.gov/dom/index.html
> This harness uses whatever DOM implementation is running on the
> client side, attempts to run available tests, and reports the results.
> Each of the tests expect to have access to common xml load routines
> and common assertion routines.  I expect that we can use the same
> code that is currently being used by the jsunit harness. The following
> needs to be done:
>
> 1) Integrate current load/assertion routines -- Mary
> 2) Validate load routines
>             -- IE (Jason)
>             -- Mozilla (Do we have a Netscape volunteer?)
> 3) Validate DOMException codes
>             -- IE (Jason)
>             -- Mozilla ?
> 4) Determine high level interface -- all
>             -- Do we want to run all tests, or be able to
>                 discriminately pick appropriate tests?
> 5) Determine reporting mechanism
>             -- simply dump returns from tests?
>             -- color-code results?
>             -- display expected vs actual?
>             -- possibly modify code to accomodate
>                 what we want to display.
> 6) Access to other testing resources ?
>             -- test assertions, <subjects>
>             -- view source code
>             -- view portion of spec being tested.
>
> Anything else?
>
> --Mary
>