TAML

[Juan Carlos Cruellas <cruellas@ac.upc.edu>]

Hi,

I have been looking at the XML file circulated by Andreas. Actually I 
find it very interesting. For your information, I comment that ETSI 
produced TS  119 134 Part 5: "Conformance Testing for XAdES Baseline 
Profile".

This TS collects what intends to be a complete test suite for testing 
conformity of XAdES signatures against the XAdES Baseline Profile, 
specified in ETSI TS 103 171.

The test suite is formed by a set of test assertions, whose formats were 
inspired in TAML. However, they are not defined in XML format. Instead 
they are defined in natural language. The predicates, in consequence 
contain rules expressed in natural language.

One of the reasons for selecting the natural language is that it is the 
intention of ESI to produce similar documents for testing compliance 
against CAdES and PAdES formats, where XML technology is not used....

For completing a bit the picture. Within the context of STF-428, in 
addition to this TS, it was also produced a tool for testing conformity 
of XAdES against XAdES Baseline Profile, implementing the test suite 
specified in the document refenced. Because of the plans for testing 
also CAdES, PAdES and ASiC formats, this tool was completelly developed 
in Java, and includes a generic framework that should be easily extended 
to also cover the aforementioned formats. As you can see the problem, 
including different languages to XML, is wider than our DSS protocol...

Having said that, I must say that the inclusion of the XML for building 
test assertions constitutes a great approach, despite the deep knowledge 
of XPath and XSLT its building seems to require.

If any experienced person in TAML would like to raise comments that 
could help to improve this, I am sure that they would be greatly 
appreciated by ETSI.


Regards

Juan Carlos.