"MonthinQA" 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.
Should specification developers be required to include test assertions as part of the specification? Who should develop the test assertions?
First, examine the objective - clear identification of a specification's requirements. Test Assertions is one way to accomplish this. Moreover, it would be nice for test assertions to be public and normative, and endorsed by the Working Group. The test assertions could be written by the spec developers or by test developers; they could be included in the specification or be a separate document.
What is important here, is that test assertions be developed and associated with the Recommendation, since there is a substantial benefit to having test assertions, including facilitating test generation.
Good question. There is still some confusion and disparity as to the rendering of these keywords. The W3C Pubsrules recommends lowercase, italics. Clearly, the intent is that there is a visible difference between the RFC2119 keywords and other text in the specification. So, which should an editor use?
A very lively discussion regarding the use of MUST in a specification to identify all the normative requirements. Or, is this just a preferred method, but other language is permitted (e.g., marked-up imperative voice statements), as long as the spec unambiguously defines what are its conformance requirements and how are they identified in the text. No conclusion has been made. We invite you to join the discussion.
To improve the readability of the QA: Framework family of Guideline documents, Karl Dubost has developed a new CSS (Mockup version). The new stylesheet and its easy to use (and modify) markup uses color, emphasis, etc., to make the Guidelines easier to read. Comments are welcome as we fine-tune the CSS.
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