DavePawson wrote:
Tony's post made me start to think about what form / category(ies?) of testing is needed.

From that thread, clearly testing with different processors is required.
Does that mean we need to test xsl-fo output and (x)html output, against some expected values? That smells like using some form of XML-diff engine; ndw uses http://www.deltaxml.com/ which is costly and commercial.

I guess it would be possible to script running against multiple
xslt engines (or some subset of all) followed by *some* form
of comparison. Schematron?

I think this has to be an incremental process, as even *some* testing is better than no testing. In particular, I can see different steps:

1) Run different XSLT processors / configurations on the various stylesheet sets ((X)HTML, FO, man, etc.) and make sure they don't fail.

2) validate the output for syntactical correctness (xmllint without validation for XML output, say)

3) validate against document types, if applicable (xmllint with validation, etc.)

4) validate final output by visually inspecting it.


The last step (4) is obviously hardest, and almost impossible to automatize. But even if you only do (1) you already catch those errors that made the 1.74.1 release a failure.

And *please* make sure the testing procedure you implement is applicable by ordinary people (e.g., doesn't involve commercial tools), as that will increase chances that contributors will run it, too.

Thanks,
      Stefan

--

     ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...


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