xml-dev - Test suite suggestion

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

David Brownell recently published some new results from the Oasis test
suite(http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/05/10/conformance/conformance.html).
This relied on a harness he had written for Java SAX parsers and
MSXML.

To allow a wider range of parsers to be tested, I suggest that we (or
Oasis) define a format (XML of course) for reporting the raw test
results.  Parser implementors would provide test harnesses to produce
data in this format, and summaries and comparative surveys could be
produced idependently by use of stylesheets.

I already do this in a rather minimal way for testing RXP; the output
looks like this:

 <RESULTS VALIDATING="yes">
[...]
 <RESULT ID="invalid--002" TYPE="invalid" SECTIONS="3.2.1" STATUS="invalid">
 <DESCRIPTION>
    Tests the "Proper Group/PE Nesting" validity constraint by
    fragmenting a content model between two parameter entities.
 </DESCRIPTION>
 <DIAGNOSTIC>
 002.ent:2:19: warning: Content particle ends in different entity from that in which it starts
 </DIAGNOSTIC>
 </RESULT>
[...]

It needs a little elaboration - it should indicate the version of the
parser and of the tests, for example.

-- Richard

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