"WeekinQA" is a bi-weekly summary of the main topics discussed on www-qa@w3.org, the public mailing-list of W3C QA Interest Group. See the calendar, initial requirements for this resource and the previous issue.
The follow-up of a thread started on May 6 by a proposal of Scott Boag went into more details during the past two weeks. The proposal was about defining a new markup to tag W3C specifications so that tests assertions could be automatically extracted from the specifications, making the job of test suites creators much easier. This markup could be an extension to the xml-spec DTD or a collection of HTML classes.
The main issue revolved round knowing whether such a markup would be efficient enough to identify all the parts of a specification a test suite creator might need. Indeed, the problem of keeping the context of an assertion is capital. Thus, is what is needed only a good markup language or a good addressing scheme too?
And, if such a markup could be designed by the QA WG, would it be mandatory for the WG to use it? It would be probably more a question of convincing the editors more than enforcing it.
The thread haven't come up with a clear resolution yet: the possibility of making the test assertions list an add-on to the specification was suggested as being a successful approach for the XSL FO test suite.
See the threads : [1] (start), [2]
The discussion on the definitions of some terms in the QA Glossary went on: especially, the difference between a test suite and a validation tool was clarified.
See the thread: [1]
After an error was signaled in the QA Matrix of W3C Specifications, Karl fixed it and announced it moved it to an XML format, welcoming suggestions of improvements.
See the thread: [1]
