Conformance Testing [Was: Time to Reorg the Doc?]
"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 94 15:15:51 EDT
Message-id: <9406301913.AA05227@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: Conformance Testing [Was: Time to Reorg the Doc?]
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
X-Comment: HTML Implementation Group (Private)
Everybody has given the following items 4's and 5's:
>@ * An SGML Declaration and one or more DTD subsets 5
>@ * Minimal conformance definition 5
>@ * Definition of element semantics 5
>@ (e.g. what rendering distinctions MUST be made)
>@ (if only there were time...)
>@ * Test Suite 5
Now that I've turned the editorial matters over to a real writer, I'm
going to concentrate on the test suite as a vehicle to clarify the
issues and aid implementors.
So what do we mean by conformance? What is an "HTML implementation"?
Is it necessarily a browser? Could an HTML->RTF converter be
considered an HTML implementation? Could sgmls be considered an HTML
implementation?
I would really rather only define the term "conforming HTML document"
in this spec, and leave it up to another spec to decide what
"conforming WWW browser" means.
This means that the following is out of scope, even though everybody
rated it very highly:
@ * Explanation of operation of anchors, forms, ISINDEX, ISMAP 4
So here's a proposed table of contents:
Preface/Foreward/"About This Document"
Revision History
Acknowledgements
Reviewer List
1. Scope (SGML application, MIME content-type)
2. Definitions
3. Entity Structure
3.1 Characters and their Representation
3.2 SGML Declaration and Prologue
4. Document Structure
4.1 Anchors and Links
4.2 Paragraphs
4.3 Headings, Titles, Sections
4.4 Lists
4.5 Preformatted Text
4.6 BlockQuote and Address
4.7 Head and Body
4.8 Images
4.9 Highlighting
4.10 Forms
5. Public Text
5.1 SGML Declaration
5.2 HTML Level 0 DTD
5.3 HTML Level 1 DTD
5.4 HTML Level 2 DTD
6. Conformance
7. References
A. Element Reference
B. Rationale
B.1 Scope -- Descriptive, not Prescriptive
* summary of changes
B.2 Definitions
B.3 Entity strucutre: .html files, missing prologue, etc.
B.4 Document Structure
* typical rendering
* how forms, ISMAP, ISINDEX work in browsers
* proposed changes
* common markup errors
B.5 Public Text
B.5.1 SGML Declaration -- NAMELEN, RE and CRLF, etc.
* proposed changes
Index
Comments?
Dan