"Month in QA" is a monthly summary of the main topics discussed on www-qa@w3.org, the public mailing-list of W3C QA Interest Group and www-qa-wg@w3.org, the public mailing-list of W3C's QA Working Group.
The regular editor for "MonthinQA" is Lynne Rosenthal, NIST, co-chair of the QA Interest Group.
See also the initial calendar and initial requirements for this resource.
Last Call Working Drafts of the QA Framework: Introduction, Operational Guidelines, and Specification Guidelines ended on 14 March 2003. The QA WG thanks all who have taken the time to read these documents and submit comments. Resolution of comments is currently underway. New versions of the documents are planned for release in June 2003.
As a result of comments on the QA Framework: Test Guidelines (TestGL) Working Draft, the document is undergoing a major revision and reorganization. In particular, the document will focus on what a good test suite should be composed of, rather than is this the right way to write a test suite. An outline provides a break down of the new structure and guidelines. A new version of the TestGL document is planned for May 2003. See minutes from Boston F2F (Mar 2003) for details of TestGL discussion.
With the coming of new technologies, often a schema and a DTD are defined. Two questions were raised for discussion: (1) How do we define the validity of a document when a schema and a DTD for the same technology do not express the same constraints? and (2) How do we express the rules for conformance? An interesting disucssion ensued, but no conclusions were reached. One view is that validity is defined by the schema language and the schema document. If there are multiple schema instances for a given document instance, then there are multiple notions of validity. Another view disagreed, documents may assert constraints over and above the constraints systematically imported from a schema, and a document which is valid in its own terms will need for these constraints to be satisfied as well as those imported from a schema. This is an area where additional discussion is needed.
The next WG face-to-face meeting is scheduled for 16-18 June 2003 in Crete, Greece. QA IG participants are wlecome to join, provided they contact the WG and IG chairs in advance.
All meeting minutes are available at: http://www.w3.org/QA/Agenda/
