Is Conformance Testing Really Needed? (cont.)

Conformance testing may already be needed:

• consider the following situation:
  • two processors, A and B, have same pass/fail record for processing James Clark's test files for fatal and non-fatal errors and are considered to both exhibit "correct" behaviour for the test suite
  • an application is built with non-validating XML processor A that respects defaulted attribute values from the internal declaration subset present in a well-formed document
  • changing to non-validating XML processor B causes different behaviour by the application because new processor does not respect declarations found in the internal declaration subset (even though section 5.1 states it must supply default attribute values)
• is a conformance test methodology necessary in order to have reported something for processor B?

+//ISBN 1-894049::CSL::OASIS::Presentations//DOCUMENT XML Conformance 1998-03-27 13:40//EN
XML'98 Conference 1998-03-27	Copyright © OASIS (9)