Re: New list of discretionary items

[Tony Graham <tgraham@mulberrytech.com>]

At 9 Aug 2000 15:29 -0400, G. Ken Holman wrote:
 > At 00/08/09 14:08 -0400, David_Marston@lotus.com wrote:
 > >Tony, thanks for composing the update. You noted:
 > > >The additional items don't always fit well with the idea of recasted
 > > >the text of the Recommendations as a question that can be answered
 > > >by 'yes' or 'no'.
 > >
 > >I think that yes/no is too much to hope for. It would be very nice if
 > >we could get the answers down to a range of keywords. Conceptually,
 > >this would be like "What languages do you support for sorting?".

I knew that just yes/no questions was too much to ask for, but I did
them that way to get some discussion going.

 > However, can we not scope our *first* version of the test suite to be as 
 > simple as possible, perhaps even deferring cultural sort schemes?

As Ken says, the first version should be as simple as possible just so
we have some hope of finishing on time.  I would dearly like to handle
language-specific sorting and numbering, but I fear that we have too
much else to do.  I also think that we should solicit
language-specific test cases from the people who actually speak those
languages.

...
 > >Since the tests
 > >need to cover so much of the text of the W3C recommendations, the
 > >additional work to mark discretionary and vague areas will be
 > >minor.
 > 
 > I'm not sure what you mean here.

Lots of minute pieces of the Recommendations need to be individually
identified.

 > I can take on the action item of seeding an XML version of the 
 > Recommendation with ID anchors so they can be referenced by IDREFs (much 
 > like I did for the summary of the XML 1.0 Recommendation in the XML 
 > Conformance Suite, except for the entire document and not just section 
 > heads).  David, have you yet documented your requirements for granularity 
 > for the citations already made by the Lotus tests?

Putting IDs in a copies of the Recommendations is a lot of work that
is not reusable for XSLT 1.1 or an XPath 1.1.

Each item in the list of discretionary behaviours that I sent last
night has an XPointer identifying the element containing the relevant
text from the Recommendations.  Those XPointers could and should be
extended to identify the relevant spans of characters within the
identified elements.

We could use XPointers to identify all significant portions of the
Recommendations and do away with needing custom versions of the
Recommendations.

Actually, one way to make the XPointers would be add markup delimiting
and identifying the spans of text to a copy of a Recommendation and
then run a stylesheet that calculated an XPointer into the undoctored
Recommendation corresponding to each of the marked up spans in the
doctored version of the Recommendation.  After all, I generated the
XPointers in last night's list using a grep-like stylesheet run on the
XML version of the Recommendations.

At least some of the XPointers would be reusable across versions of
the Recommendations, and the XPointers could be made more robust by
using XPointers that started at elements with IDs or that started at
divs with specified titles instead of the navigating from the root as
is done so far.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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Tony Graham                            mailto:tgraham@mulberrytech.com
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