A joint announcement from OASIS and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes the public availability of the OASIS XML Conformance Test Suite, second edition. The conformance test suite has been updated to be in synchronization with XML 1.0 Second Edition, Recommendation. The test suite has been produced by the OASIS XML Conformance Technical Committee in conjunction with the W3C XML Core Working Group, resulting in the development of "comprehensive testing scenarios which now integrate over 1000 new tests contributed by IBM and modification of the test suite to be consistent with changes to the XML recommendation."

"The OASIS XML Conformance Technical Committee provides a forum where XML vendors, content providers, and users can discuss issues that are pertinent to XML conformance and interoperability. The objective of this committee is to develop tests and associated documentation that can be used by developers and users alike to determine whether a particular XML processor adheres to the XML 1.0 Recommendation. As conformance tests are developed, questions arise concerning the XML Recommendation and particular XML implementations. This committee provides a process to discuss a particular test case and a mechanism to input interpretation problems to the W3C XML Core WG, who has responsibility for resolving such issues."

From the 2001-03-05 announcement:

OASIS, the XML interoperability consortium, together with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, announced that the second edition of the popular OASIS XML Conformance Test Suite would be publicly available March 15, 2001. The new OASIS conformance test suite, updated to be in sync with XML Second Edition, includes more than 1,000 new tests.

"Major XML software vendors rely on the OASIS test suite to ensure their products are compliant with the W3C XML recommendation," said Mary Brady of NIST, chair of the OASIS XML Conformance Technical Committee. "This second edition builds on that success and provides additional conformance tests. We integrated over 1000 new tests contributed by IBM and modified the test suite to be consistent with changes to the XML recommendation. Cooperation from the W3C XML Core Working Group was invaluable in helping us develop comprehensive testing scenarios."

"OASIS, with the assistance of NIST, is uniquely positioned to deliver reliable, objective XML conformance tests," commented Laura Walker, executive director of OASIS. "Together, we bring an independent perspective to the W3C XML recommendation, and that is very important. We've been developing conformance test suites for three years, and are gratified that XML technology vendors find these tests instrumental to their success."

Users and vendors may download the OASIS XML Conformance Test Suite Second Edition from the Consortium's web site, http://www.oasis-open.org beginning March 15.

See also: DOM Level 1 Conformance Test Suite. "The DOM Level 1 Conformance Test Suite was developed by NIST and submitted to OASIS for the benefit of the entire XML community. DOM Level 1 provides a standard set of objects for representing HTML and XML documents, a standard model of how these objects can be combined and a standard interface for accessing and manipulating them. There are two Test Suites for DOM Level 1, one for the ECMAScript binding and the other for the Java binding. The ECMAScript DOM Test Suite is interactive; it runs on the NIST server and provides instant results of what passes and fails. It is possible to view the source code of the test, link to the test purposes (semantic requirements), and link to the appropriate section in the W3C DOM Recommendation. The test suite contains over 800 ECMAScript tests, covering all fundamental, extended, and HTML interfaces. It requires IE5 to run. The Java DOM Test Suite contains over 200 Java tests, covering all fundamental and extended interfaces. The tests are organized into a set of classes, one class for each interface. Each class includes a set of methods that exercise that particular interface. The suite includes a test driver that takes as input an implementation, an interface, and an output file. Both of these test suites are available at http://xw2k.sdct.itl.nist.gov/xml/dom-test-suite.html"> [see the OASIS Resources page.]