Fw: Call for Participation: W3C Quality Assurance and ConformanceWorksh

W3C is holding a workshop on Quality Assurance and Conformance for W3C
technologies.

Date:      3-4 April 2001
Location: Washington D.C. area, U.S.A (hosted by NIST)

The Call for Participation is on the Web at:

   http://www.w3.org/2001/01/qa-ws

The full Call for Participation contains information about registration
requirements and procedures. The deadlines for this workshop are:

        Position paper due: 16 March 2001
        Registration closes: 28 March 2001

Excerpted from the Workshop description page:

==========
Background

Universality and Interoperability are core to W3C's goals and
operating principles. In order for specifications developed at W3C to
permit full interoperability and access to all, it is very important
that the quality of implementation of these standards be given as much
attention as their development.

In 2000, the W3C Team suggested taking a new lead in improving the
quality of implementation for W3C technologies and received strong
support from the membership. We are considering a new Conformance and
Quality Assurance Activity and as a first step we've started gathering
and formalizing existing QA efforts for the various languages and
protocols we develop (see our QA matrix under development).

As the complexity of W3C specifications and their interdependencies
increases, QA will become even more important to ensuring their
acceptance and deployment in the market. The past
experiences of HTML, CSS or more recently SMIL (all implemented with
various degrees of conformance by vendors) are strong incentives to
start this activity with due diligence.

A workshop is the natural W3C way of gathering interest and
establishing a charter for a new activity, so we have decided to hold
one in partnership with NIST, a leader in the development of
conformance tests, in particular with W3C technologies.

Workshop Goal

The main objective of the workshop is to have W3C, its membership and
the Web community involved in QA at large to share their understanding
of the state of affairs for Web QA tools, technical and business
practices and conformance activities at W3C or related to W3C
specifications.

Furthermore, as we're planning the start of a new W3C activity, one of
our goals is to get feedback on the best course of action within W3C
that would improve the quality of W3C specifications' implementation in
the field over time (i.e. what will be in the charter of this
activity). To that effect, a DRAFT Activity Proposal will be circulated
prior to and discussed during the workshop.

Scope

Besides the shape to give this new potential W3C QA activity, there
are several areas of interest related to Quality Assurance and
Conformance of W3C technologies that we would like to hear about at
the workshop:

   - experience in validation of Web content and documents (e.g. is
     this CSS page valid?)
   - online testing conformance of user agents (is this multimedia
     player correctly implementing SMIL1.0?)
   - quality of W3C specifications themselves (wrt conformance
     statement, tutorial, etc)
   - conformance testing methodology (e.g., test design and components
     of a test suite)
   - certification/labeling of content, products or services
   - common framework/harness for running test
   - coordination with W3C Working Group developing specifications
   - IPR and funding model

Position papers focused on general software or business QA practices
(unrelated to W3C specifications or to the items above) are not in
scope for this workshop.

==========

Should you have questions regarding the workshop, please feel free to
contact Daniel Dardailler (danield@w3.org) or Karl Dubost (karl@w3.org).
--
Karl Dubost / W3C - Conformance Manager
          http://www.w3.org/

     --- Be Strict To Be Cool! ---

xslt-conformance message