- From: Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>
- Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 21:57:20 -0600 (MDT)
- To: Lofton Henderson <lofton@rockynet.com>
- cc: www-qa@w3.org
On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Lofton Henderson wrote: > This encapsulates one aspect of this dialog that I have been thinking > about. The benefit that you can reasonably obtain by authoring the > standard (REC) spec in XML might widely vary, depending on the type of > standard. I agree. > <snip> > > On the other hand, a spec like SVG has lots of testable assertions that > (verbosely) define how given pieces of the SVG content are rendered into > visual, graphical effect. It would an enormous (and not necessarily > desirable) undertaking to write SVG otherwise. In this case, the most you > might be able to achieve with XML is: > > <testAssertion id="this-particular-assertion's-id"> > ...some rendering specification... (English or another human language)... > </testAssertion> > > The content, "...some rendering specification..." still suffers from the > imprecision of human language. > > Having said that, the above still would bring considerable value -- the > ability to automatically extract the (possibly imprecise) test assertions > for various test-suite-related activity, and the ability to generate > precise references from outside the spec to the test assertions within the > spec. Yes. I have no problems with using XML on meta level to partition documents and to identify or refer to important pieces. Note that the _requirements_ are still written in English in this case. Most humans working with computers can read the above XML sample and understand it immediately. The problem arises only when humans have to write or read hairy XML that is more suitable for machines. Alex.
Received on Tuesday, 23 October 2001 23:57:21 UTC