Tin Man Design Question 6 - to vote Jan. 9th?

[David_Marston@lotus.com]

Here is one of the issues identified in my message titled
"Test Case Markup & Cataloging, Tin Man edition" that I sent
to this list on 12/1/2000:
6. Is there any operational problem with having all
discretionary items lumped under one <Discretionary> element?

DISCUSSION:
I'm sorry that this is such a dry question. Tony, Carmelo, or
anyone else thinking about how the test harness will use the
catalog data needs to consider whether it makes a difference.
In Tin Man, it's proposed that there is zero or one element
called Discretionary, which contains as many sub-elements as
needed to represent all the discretionary items that affect
the applicability of this test case. The alternative is to
allow ~50 optional elements directly inside TestCase, each
named for a discretionary item.

This question is not about the naming scheme for the ~50
items themselves. Keep in mind that the list is likely to
expand when XSLT 1.1 and 2.0 come under our consideration,
plus expansion based on supporting more languages in the
test system.

I advocated the encompassing Discretionary item because it
helps in managing the data. It might also provide a filtering
hook for the catalog as a whole.

We could discuss this and vote only if there seem to be two
schools of thought.
.................David Marston