This subproject addresses the conformance testing of XML processors, according to the XML 1.0 (2nd edition) specification. Here you will find test results (click on the links at left) as well as information about generating such reports yourself, using some of the related components.

Project Components

See this section of the first XML.com conformance article for background on this XML testing. Key components involved in that testing are:

1. A categorized database of test cases, which are each XML documents to produce specific behaviors from XML processors. We use bugfixed versions of the NIST/OASIS XML conformance test suite, which has received a significant level of industry review.
2. An XML processor to be tested, and implementing some API that supports such testing. For Java processors, SAX is the API used. For COM based processors, the IE5 XML processor is a de facto API standard that is partly based on DOM Level 1. Other APIs may of course be testable.
3. A test harness, or driver, used to generate reports about how correctly the processor reacts to each test case. One is required for each API supported. The SAX-based driver needs Java; and the COM-based harness uses JavaScript.

These rely on unofficial revisions to the NIST/OASIS XML conformance test cases (2nd edition). The suite of test cases needs updates to address XML specification errata, as well as problems in the version provided by the NIST/OASIS team (evidently someone mangled a lot of test cases by misusing ZIP). Also, there are some additional tests contributed by the SourceForge project. W3C finally got involved. See their new XML Conformance Test Suites page, which builds on the tests accumulated by OASIS.

An interesting thing about that categorized database: it's in XML. The test harnesses rely on a bootstrap XML parser (which can of course be conformance tested, as a sanity and regression test) and XML tools can be provided to massage the database.

Namespaces: NYET

There aren't yet any testcases addressing namespace support as such. XML 1.0 processors by definition do not conform to the XML namespaces specification, since they accept colons in places that the namespaces specification disallows them. Properly categorized test cases must address such issues; there are both syntactic issues to test, and structural ones requiring definitions of referenced prefixes.

Similarly, the test harnesses don't yet address namespace support. For SAX2 parsers, namespace support should be tested as part of the XML processor API. For DOM/COM based processor APIs, this requires DOM Level 2 support.

Helping Out

Associated with this SourceForge project is a forum and a developer's mailing list. Check out the SourceForge control panel for the project to see the latest.

You can run tests, and submit them, for parsers; ideally, project teams with parsers would do this when they publish new releases. Test results should be identified according to the developer who reported them.

If you have a database of test cases you use (say, things that previously broke your parser, but don't do so any longer!), please drop a line.