docbook testing

[DavePawson <davep@dpawson.co.uk>]

Tony's post made me start to think about what form / category(ies?) of 
testing is needed.

 From that thread, clearly testing with different processors is required.
Does that mean we need to test xsl-fo output and (x)html output, against 
some expected values? That smells like using some form of XML-diff 
engine; ndw uses http://www.deltaxml.com/ which is costly and commercial.

I guess it would be possible to script running against multiple
xslt engines (or some subset of all) followed by *some* form
of comparison. Schematron?


Alternatives?

Test the stylesheets? Sounds like more than a little nightmare?
http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/utilities/unit-testing/  Jeni has 
approached unit testing, though the idea of making the stylesheets
even bigger doesn't sound appealing.



Tony is using 
https://docbook.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/docbook/trunk/testdocs/tests/
for test sources. Sounds like a good starting point. It does leave
open the comparison with some 'expected' values though, for either
media.

That would leave all the other output formats that have been
developed.

An approach would be to take a well known output, say HTML
and attempt some incrementally increasing level of test with
the test docs, develop 'expected' values and address automating
the output comparison task.

Thoughts?


regards

-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk