Fwd: [oiic-formation-discuss] Acid Tests

["Luc Bollen" <luc.bol@gmail.com>]

Oops, should have replied to the distribution list...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Luc Bollen <luc.bol@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:32 PM
Subject: Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] Acid Tests
To: Shawn <sgrover@open2space.com>

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:16 PM, <robert_weir@us.ibm.com> wrote:

What may be doable, and more in line with the HTML Acid tests, is to forgo any claims that it is a comprehensive test.  Instead, we might think of it like this:

1) TC conducts a study of the state of ODF interoperability today
2) TC identifies the 10, 20, 50 or whatever features that in practice are causing interoperability problems
3) TC creates a "State of ODF Interoperability" report, and accompanies it with an Acid-style test that exercises those 10, 20 or 50 features.
4) The press will pick up on this, but we should let others deal with the name and shame
5) When the state of implementation improves, then loop back to #1

-Rob

I fully agree with the proposed approach.  This is very similar to the way Acid Tests are used for testing web browsers behaviour.

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 9:54 PM, Shawn <sgrover@open2space.com> wrote:

If we are simply looking for an "easy" way for the general public to test their documents, might I propose a web page where said user can upload a file to be tested.  Then a server side app runs it's test, produces a report and/or sample output.  This would be a usable approach by the general public.

Of course, that leaves a lot of questions regarding what tests will be done, what is the base the document is being compared against, etc.  But that's what this TC is about, isn't it?  :)  (once the charter for it has been completed...)

Acid tests are good tools for testing the "Input" behaviour of ODF applications.  Validators are well adapted for testing the "Output" part of these applications.

Such a validator tool is already proposed by the OpenDocument Fellowship (http://opendocumentfellowship.com/validator), but I don't know exactly what is validated and how.

Note that it will be more efficient to cooperate with the Fellowship to update/improve their tool rather than starting something similar from scratch, but I don't know how to formulate such a proposal for cooperation in the charter.  Rob, any suggestion ?