Using existing staff.xml based tests with HTML processors

I was thinking that you could produce an close [X]HTML analogue of staff.xml
by doing a direct translation of each element in staff to a distinct [X]HTML
element with a similar content model.  

Most of the elements simply contain PCDATA and have no attributes, so you
could make <employeeId> to <code> and <salary> to <pre>, etc and could
change <address domestic="">something</address> to <a href="">something</a>,
<employee> could go to <p>.  The only structural change that would be
changing <staff> to <html><body>.

Though the resulting HTML document would be gibberish (but valid gibberish),
it would then allow most of existing tests to also be automatically
translated and you would add 300+ tests that would now run on HTML, XHTML
and XML implementations.  Since it is likely that some processors would
recognize XHTML elements and use XHTML specific node implementations, I
think it would be worthwhile to preserve the existing tests and just add the
new derived tests.  So XML processors would run 600 tests and HTML
processors would only run the 300 that they were compatible with.

Any thoughts?  How would you name the new tests? Prefix or postfix "HTML"?
Something else?

Received on Wednesday, 6 March 2002 12:35:00 UTC