Subject: Atom assertion-annotated specifications

From: Ken MacLeod <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 Aug 2004 22:06:01 -0500

[Also posted at http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/blog/atom-anno-specs.html]

In addition to the Feed Validator[1], there are a (slowly) growing
number of Atom conformance tests[2] (for feeds, aggregators, and more)
and interest in getting more test suites started.  I've been reading
up on Quality Assurance at W3C [3] (IETF and OASIS don't have QA
guidelines, that I'm aware of) and one of the "next big steps" in
connecting-the-dots between specifications, test suites, and
implementation reports is a list of all the assertions in the
specification, so that tests can be linked to the assertion in the
specification that they test, and implementations can report which
features (assertions) they implement and which tests they pass.

I now have an early release of the assertions in the Atom Format and
Protocol (-01 version of both) as highlighted and annotated versions
of the specifications.  Each assertion is highlighted in yellow and
given a sequential assertion number within each section.  (Note: these
assertion numbers are not yet stable in this release.)  The source for
the annotation script and feature lists is in the same directory.

    http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/2004/08/atom-qa/format-01-anno.html
    http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/2004/08/atom-qa/protocol-01-anno.html

The next little steps with the assertion list is to get it formatted
into its own pair of documents to provide a check-list for test
suites, and include such information as the [version stable]
assertion-ID, whether the specified behavior is required or optional,
and the roles that the behavior applies to (feed producer, aggregator,
editing client, etc.)

We'll see where the next big steps take us after that...

  -- Ken

[1] http://feedvalidator.org/
[2] http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/ConformanceTests
[3] http://www.w3.org/QA/