RE: Conformance testing info

["Arnold, Curt" <Curt.Arnold@hyprotech.com>]

> > My guess is that OASIS/NIST (#1) is maintaining XML 
> conformance tests
> > using SAX.  W3C/NIST (#2) are working on tests for DOM.  It 
> seems that
> > xmlconf (#3) has a modified old version of the tests from #1 and a
> > version of the tests for #2 converted to use JUnit.
> 
> [ Maybe Curt Arnold can describe #2 ... those are DOM tests, 
> not XML tests ]

The domunit tests in xmlconf.sourceforge.net are the most useful DOM test suite currently available.  Basically, it is a variant of the NIST Java test suite but enhanced to work with any JAXP
supporting parser and the tests were modified so that allowable behaviors (such as entity expansion) do not cause a false failure.

Hopefully, that will be soon (say within the month) be obsolesced by the work that the DOM TS group is working on of which I am a very active participant and contributor.

The DOM TS framework consists of:

Transforms that process the DOM specs and produce DTD's and XML schemas for corresponding test definition languages.

A collection of tests written in these markup languages

Transforms that generate corresponding source code for combinations of programming language, binding and test framework.

Utility classes and adapters that allow the tests to be run within common test frameworks.

Hopefully within the next week or so, that the framework will be able to convert tests, compile the source code, and the currently missing capability, actually run the tests and the initial test
collection will be populated by NIST.

At that time, it should be fairly simple for other test contributors to convert their existing tests to the XML representation and validate, generate, and run the tests and then if desired submit the
tests to the W3C for consideration for inclusion in the test suite.

Support for additional target languages (ECMAScript, Python, C#, Xerces-C) should follow rapidly.

For more details, see http://www.w3.org/DOM/Test/

The current (raw) state of the software is available from the 2001/DOM-Test-Suite module on dev.w3.org (CVS web from http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2001/DOM-Test-Suite)

Discussion takes place on the www-dom-ts@w3.org mailing lists and tests and other submissions can be sent to www-dom-ts-submission@w3.org