Re: XML Schema Test Collection open for contributions

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>

>At 09:49 AM 5/2/01 -0600, Arnold, Curt wrote:
>>Congrats to all on reaching recommendation.  Now on to fully
>>implementing and testing the thing.
>
>Yikes!  I thought the the CR phase was supposed to be about implementing
>and testing.

CR phase trials the implementability of the spec.  There is a chart
somewhere showing, feature by feature, which features had been successfully
implemented. When there were many (say, 3 or more) different successful
implementations of a feature, the WG deemed that feature to be
"implementable" and considered the feedback from developers.

In some cases implementation was slow in coming: key/keyref/unique springing
to mind.  We can take that to indicate that either the CR spec for
key/keyref/unique was too hard, or it was deficient, or it was not a
"must-have" feature in the minds of implementors, or that implementors were
having difficulty getting that far within the 3 month CR period.

Consequently, key/keyref/unique were simplified for XS 1.0.  I think there
were a couple of other features in the same boat--perhaps dates, though both
also had new information coming along even at the last moment, which is why
the spec took fairly minimalist and revisable approaches to both dates (just
provide Gregorian with no hierarchy) and key/keyref/unique (very simple
Xpath subsets.)

On the other hand, the test collection allows testing the implementations of
the spec, so it is quite different in purpose from CR.   It is _also_ (but
not primarily) a systematic way to get feedback on the areas of the schema
specs which confuse implementers, both for the technical content and the
wording; but the primary purpose should be to allow one implementation to
read a schema, create the components, assess a document, do a Richard's Dump
of the PSVI, and verify that PSVI against the expected one.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe