Unicorn

Unicorn Response specification

Presentation

In future versions, we plan to replace this with RDF that could be "mapped" to any XML format. This RDF will provide classes such as Error or Column, but as this is quite hard to implement, we chose a simpler first solution: impose a generic output to each observer.

This output is a XML document conforming to a particular schema, and will probably imply to write a specific output on each observer.

But whatever the choice, the different solutions will provide the same features.

To write this XML schema, we used the document http://esw.w3.org/topic/MarkupValidator/M12N.

This schema should be able to fit any observer needs, but, if not, we hope it will be extensible.

Description of the elements

Observationresponse

The observationresponse element forms the root of a response and contains the following elements :

• Exactly one uri element containing the URI of the document validated
• An optional checkedby element containing the URI of the observer
• An optional version element containing information on what was checked, such as CSS2.1, XHTML1.0, Links, ...
• An optional date element containing the date of the observation
• An optional passed element indicating if the document has passed the observation. Its default value is set to true.
• A result element containing all the useful observations.

Result

The result element is the container for all the messages produced during the observation. It can contain zero or one of the following:

• An errors element.
• A warnings element.
• A informations element.

Errors, warnings and informations

These three elements are built on the same model:

• An attribute xml:lang indicating the language of the messages
• Zero or one count element (errorcount, warningcount or infocount) containing the total number of errors, warnings, informations.
• Zero or more list element (errorlist, warninglist or infolist), one for each sub-document. See below for more information.

Errorlist, warninglist and infolist

Each list contains can contain:

• Exactly one uri element, containing the URI of the sub-document represented by this list
• Zero or one count element (errorcount, warningcount or infocount) containing the number of messages for this sub-document
• Zero or more error element (resp. warning, info)

Error

An error element can contain zero or one of the following:

• A line element: the line in the source code where the error appears
• A column element: the column in the source code where the error appears
• A errortype element: can be one of:
  • critical if a critical error appeared (such as "file not found" or "unsupported mime type", ...)
  • lexical if an error during the lexical analysis appeared (such as an unknown token)
  • semantic if an error during the semantic analysis appeared (such as a grammar rule mismatch)
  • ... (other types might be needed)
• A context element containing a piece of source code showing where the error appeared

It must also contain at least one message element and can contain several longmessage element. These elements will contain descriptions of the error.

Warning

A warning element can contain zero or one of the following:

• A line element: the line in the source code where the error appears.
• A column element: the column in the source code where the error appears.
• A level element: [0, 1, 2, 3], the higher the more important.
• A context element containing a piece of source code showing where the error appeared.

It must also contain at least one message element and can contain several longmessage element. These elements will contain descriptions of the warning.

Info

An info element can contain zero or one of the following:

• A line element: the line in the source code where the error appears.
• A column element: the column in the source code where the error appears.
• A context element containing a piece of source code showing where the error appeared.

It must also contain at least one message element and can contain several longmessage element. These elements will contain descriptions of the info.

Long message

A longmessage element can contain one or more of the following:

• Any text data.
• One or more a element: link as in html with a href attribute.
• One or more img element: display picture as in html with a src and a alt attribute.
• One or more code element: use to indicate code as in html.

Full schema

The schema of an observation response can be found at observer-response.xsd.

Sample response document

<?xml version='1.0' encoding="utf-8"?>
<observationresponse xmlns="http://www.w3.org/unicorn/observationresponse"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/unicorn/observationresponse http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/Unicorn/response/observer-response.xsd">
  <uri>http://example.org</uri>
  <checkedby>http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/</checkedby>
  <version>css2</version>
  <date>2006-05-22T11:22:54</date>
  <passed>false</passed>
  <result>

    <errors xml:lang="en">
      <errorcount>5</errorcount>
      <errorlist>
        <uri>http://www.example.org/style.css</uri>
        <errorcount>3</errorcount>
        <error>
          <line>331</line>
          <column>10</column>
          <errortype>semantic</errortype>
          <context>div.citation, div.spoiler</context>
          <message>The property -moz-border-radius doesn't exist.</message>
        </error>
        <error>
          <line>344</line>
          <errortype>semantic</errortype>
          <context>table#navbar</context>
          <message>The property -moz-border-radius doesn't exist.</message>
        </error>
        <error>
          <line>347</line>
          <errortype>semantic</errortype>
          <context>table#navbar td.alt2</context>
          <message>The property -moz-border-radius-topleft doesn't exist.</message>
        </error>
      </errorlist>

      <errorlist>
        <uri>http://www.example.org/style2.css</uri>
        <errorcount>2</errorcount>
        <error>
          <line>328</line>
          <errortype>semantic</errortype>
          <context>div.citation, div.spoiler</context>
          <message>The property -moz-border-radius doesn't exist.</message>
        </error>
        <error>
          <line>341</line>
          <errortype>semantic</errortype>
          <context>table#navbar</context>
          <message>The property -moz-border-radius doesn't exist.</message>
        </error>
      </errorlist>
    </errors>

    <warnings xml:lang="en">
      <warningcount>0</warningcount>
    </warnings>

    <miscmessages xml:lang="en">
      <miscmessagecount>1</miscmessagecount>

      <miscmessagelist>
        <uri>http://example.org</uri>
        <miscmessage>
          <message>You should also try to validate XHTML</message>
          <longmessage> CSS works better with valid XHTML. Check the document using the
            markup-validator (http://validator.w3.org). </longmessage>
        </miscmessage>
      </miscmessagelist>

    </miscmessages>
  </result>
</observationresponse>