Anchors and test cases

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

Rob asked about the test cases before we got off into other discussions 
this morning.

It will probably surprise David but not only would I like to have the 
*ability* to include the test cases but other information as well.

To that end, I am going to be inserting the titles of the various 
operators and functions in as anchors in the current draft. To 
distinguish them from other usages, I anticipate starting everyone with 
"anchor:" followed by all lowercase and hyphens for multiple words. Not 
terribly imaginative I know but I will forget any "cute" convention that 
we invent so better to have something rather plain.

Since for the past 20 or so years we have been telling users that markup 
means that we can re-purpose content and make it suit their needs, I 
think like for ODF 1.2 part 1, we need to make that possible with part 
2. Yes, it is a little more work but imagine a version/view of 
OpenFormula that for a function includes not only the test cases but 
implementation notes from another document format on the same function, 
and on the implementation of OpenFormula, plus perhaps notes from the 
OpenOffice effort.

True, none of that would be canonical but it would be using the 
normative text that we create as the framework in which all that 
information is presented. One can imagine some banker that is only 
interested in comparing their HP calculator results with the basis 
materials. ;-) OK, maybe that isn't realistic but I can imagine vendors 
at least for in house purposes that want to annotate their copies of 
OpenFormula with their implementation notes.

Personally I think a demonstration of that sort of "dynamic" quality of 
the OpenFormula standard document would play well at the next ODF 
plugfest. I can imagine accounting departments extracting and creating 
their own documentation for internal purposes. Well, that would be using 
the ref targets instead of the anchors but we need those as well.

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)