Re: Testcase attrcreatetextnode2.xml in level1/core does not exercise the test

There appears to have been a 24 hour delay in messages getting relayed.  It is not just you.

The conformant value is "Y&ent1;" or "Y%ent1" depending on the test.  The test was intended to expose a potential flaw where the parameter was processed through an entity expansion step.  If that flaw existed then "Y&ent1;" would be incorrectly expanded to "Yes", however "Y%ent1" would either not be recognized as anything special or even more unlikely as a incomplete parameter entity reference.  If such a flaw existed, "Y&ent1;" is much more likely to expose it than "Y%ent1".

I believe the use of the same fragment "Y&ent1;" in staff.xml and in the test was intentional, that the test author wanted to do something with a DOM method that looked very much like content in the XML document, but had different results due to the entity expansion step in parsing the XML document and the lack of an entity expansion step in processing values set by DOM methods.

I don't think there is any difficulty distinguishing between the initial state and a conformant state.  After the setValue call, the attribute would have a value that would have required the XML document to have contained "Y&ent1;".

I'm pretty sure that attrcreatetextnode3 does what the author of attrcreatetextnode was wanting to do but didn't quite accomplish.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mary Brady 
  To: www-dom-ts@w3.org 
  Cc: mbrady@nist.gov 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 8:45 AM
  Subject: Re: Testcase attrcreatetextnode2.xml in level1/core does not exercise the test


  Hmmm -- not I'm even more confused.  When I looked at 
  the original test, I thought that the expected result was 
  supposed to be "Y&ent1;", not the expanded version.  I 
  don't have the spec in front of me at the moment, but I 
  believe both it and the comment against it were that the 
  expected result should not expand the entity, rather be 
  the text itself.  Thus, there was a problem with the test, 
  setting the result to "Y%ent1" instead of "Y&ent1;".  At 
  that point, I would have changed the test to simply use 
  "Y&ent1;" instead.  After further consideration, it might 
  be better to change it to be some other entity, maybe 
  "Y&ent2;", since that particular attribute is already set 
  to "Y&ent1;" in the staff.xml file -- it's difficult to determine 
  that the setValue actually did anything otherwise.

  --Mary

  P.S.  Please for the moment cc: Rick and/or myself or 
  www-dom-ts issues if you want feedback.  We seem to 
  be having problems getting mail from this list.