RE: [tag] Test Assertion Modeling - comments, etc

["Serm Kulvatunyou" <serm@nist.gov>]

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Back to the SBS example though, I'm a little apprehensive about the way a
necessarily vague conformance clause might impact on TAs. I guess there are
all sorts of way of implementing a markup standard for instance (look at all
the types of products which variously implement HTML, XHTML or docbook for
example - browsers, XSLT apps, mappers, editors, pdf generators, office
apps, etc) and each would perhaps need a different conformance clause and
consequently different TA lists to test such conformance. Or the conformance
could be defined just as schema validity and the products left on their own
to work out how they should otherwise conform and produce TAs themselves
with the potential loss of interoperability, etc. I'm a bit worried that a
trend to make TAs as part of standard design might either be biased toward
just the most obvious types of implementation and ignore future innovation
and that it might therefore make conformance too specific and rigid with
such applications in mind. Not a problem so much for APIs though where the
conformance is almost exclusively a matter for applications and therefore
TAs are more predictable and clear cut. Maybe this is a groundless concern
though - after all XForms seems to be suited to its W3C test suite despite
XForms being a markup language and not an API.

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