- From: Dimitris Dimitriadis <dimitris@ontologicon.com>
- Date: Mon, 6 May 2002 23:00:35 +0200
- To: scott_boag@us.ibm.com
- Cc: spec-prod@w3.org, w3c-query-editors@w3.org, www-qa@w3.org
Scott, Being an editor of the Specification Guidelines document in the QA activity, where I advocate this, I'm happy to see that more people are thinking about these things. In the document (see http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/2002/04/qaframe-spec-0429.html for the latest draft), you'll find similar ideas that definitely need to be worked on. I look forward to your input and will provide comments on your work. best, /Dimitris On Monday, May 6, 2002, at 07:29 , scott_boag@us.ibm.com wrote: > A colleague and I have been talking about how to do more precise > testing of > W3C specifications, and how the specification markup might help. > > GOALS: > Allow an external document (test case, erratum, email, etc.) to point > directly at a "testable" normative sentence in a Recommendation. > Encourage document editors to view some of the sentences as "test > assertions" and to write them in a style that conveys precisely what > they declare. > Explore possibilities for machine processing of testable sentences in > the future. > Link error assertions to error catalogues (see the work that Mike > Kay is > doing with the XSLT document: ( > http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#error-summary)). > Provide a tagging scheme for testing of grammatical statements, such > as > the ad-hoc one employed in the XPath/XQuery specifications. > Possibly provide markup also for discretionary behavior. > > So our proposal is to add a tagging structure to > http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/06/xmlspec-report.htm, > http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/06/xmlspec.dtd, that allows editors to > achieve > the above goals. > > Test cases will nearly always have to cite more than one testable > sentence > and/or production, unless the Rec is issued with test assertions in a > separate appendix. We should experiment with enhanced tagging to see > how it > influences sentence structure. Some complex sentences with multiple "or" > parts crossing each other may get restructured just to make citing them > more precise. Consider this sentence from part 16.4 of XSLT 1.0: "Thus, > it > is an error to disable output escaping for an xsl:value-of or xsl:text > element that is used to generate the string-value of a comment, > processing > instruction or attribute node; it is also an error to convert a result > tree > fragment to a number or a string if the result tree fragment contains a > text node for which escaping was disabled." That one sentence has 8-10 > testable assertions. > > So far, we are not proposing concrete details. First we wanted to see > what > people thought of the idea, if anyone has experimented with something > like > this so far, and whether or not this would be worth a concrete proposal. > > -scott > > > >
Received on Monday, 6 May 2002 17:00:48 UTC