Depiction of my ideas for normative/rendition report structure

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

Hi folks!

No-one has put forward contributions yet for discussions at the table on 
Monday ... I thought I would add one of my own.

In my earlier posting I posited that the normative XSLT/XPath Conformance 
Report be an XML instance and a collection of files collected from all 
contributions.  This would be synthesized from all contributions from 
contributors in an automated fashion, allowing a contributor to replace a 
complete suite of files without operator intervention.

I would hope we could key all information from disparate sources in such a 
way to synthesize the report (let's practice what we preach!) without 
operator intervention from the large collection of instances making up the 
content in manageable, editable chunks.

Such a large document, with all options for all optional features and 
behaviours for an XSLT processor, would be handy for some, but certainly 
not for the bulk of our report's users.

I suggested that we have a configuration document, which I'm thinking of 
calling a "rendition control instance" that qualifies all of the optional 
behaviours and features of an XSLT processor.  Running a projection of the 
report with the rendition control instance produces an informative 
(non-normative) rendition of the report tailored for a given XSLT processor.

A user would then use the tailored rendition for their testing purposes and 
not have to deal with the excess tests, descriptions and results not 
applicable to their particular situation.

I've tried to depict that in this document:

   http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xslt/contributions/Holman-20000602.gif

Not shown in the diagram are the normative copies of the contributions from 
all contributors ... our report's users would come to *one* place for the 
normative copy of all documents for a given revision of the report.  One a 
revision of the report is released, nothing would be modified until the 
release of a different revision with new files.

I hope this makes enough sense to bring up for consideration in our efforts.

Thanks!

............... Ken

--
G. Ken Holman                    mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
Crane Softwrights Ltd.             http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/m/
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