Re: Saxon-SA Schema Test Suite results

Thanks very much for digging into this, Michael.  A few points:

First, we at Microsoft acknowledge that we erred in submitting the tests with non-conforming regex expressions to the W3C.  A decision was made some time ago to align the regex behavior in the MS XSD implementations with that in the underlying Windows and .NET libraries.  Naturally our internal tests are aligned with our specs, but we should have culled these out before submitting them to W3C, and apologize for this oversight.  W3C should probably simply remove all those  tests that exercise regex functionality for which you filed bugs.

Second, we now have our critical mass of XSD experts back from the holidays, and we will dig into the other cases you flagged. We commit to publishing our report on conformance with the W3C suite at the same level of detail that you have. Those reports which we accept as bugs will be filed against our implementations, and those about which we dispute your interpretation of the spec will be discussed publicly on xmlschema-dev and/or the bugzilla comment threads.  We hope that the result will be both more conformant implementations from all of us and (probably) a list of ambiguities in the XSD spec that the WG may wish to consider in drafting 1.1.

Third, it may be worth noting that we ran the Sun and NIST tests when they were first submitted to W3C and filed two bugs against our implementations.  So overall, our implementations are 100% conformant with the tests we submitted and more than 99% conformant with the others.  That, at least in my humble opinion, indicates that XSD interoperability is pretty good at this point.  As you mentioned, it is mainly corner cases where various implementations give different results.

Finally,  about our processes for fixing the bugs in our implementations and tests that are exposed by this exercise: In general, we promise our customers to NOT make "breaking changes" customers in service packs, so don't expect any bugs that we acknowledge to be fixed before the next release of the MSXML or System.Xml libraries.  I can't commit to all conformance bugs being fixed in the next releases, but we will give these very careful consideration.

Michael Champion
Program Manager, XML Standards
Microsoft Data Programmability - XML team

Received on Wednesday, 10 January 2007 23:46:28 UTC