standard addresses the construction and use
of test suites for verifying conformance of SGML
systems. Its provisions assist those who build test
suites, those who build SGML systems to be evaluated
by such suites, and those who examine an
SGML system's performance on a test suite as part
of the process of selecting an SGML tool.
In particular, this standard includes:
? criteria for the organization of test suites,
including naming conventions, documentation
conventions, and specification of applicable concrete
syntaxes and features. Among other
advantages, these conventions facilitate any
non-SGML automatic processing that may be
convenient for the developers or the users of the
tests;
NOTE ? An example of such non-SGML processing is
sorting tests by name.
? a standard form for describing test results
that makes clear what has been proven or disproven
by the tests;
? the specification of a Reference Application
for SGML Testing (RAST) that interprets all
markup to allow machine comparison of test
results for documents conforming to ISO 8879.
RAST indicates in a standard way when tags,
processing instructions, and data are recognized
by the parser, replacing references and processing
markup declarations and marked sections
appropriately. RAST tests information likely to be
passed by a general-purpose SGML parser to an
application but does not test additional information
that some parsers provide;
? the specification of a Reference Application
for Capacity Testing (RACT) that reports a validating
parser's capacity calculations. An SGML
systemthat supports this application indicates its
ability to report capacity errors regardless of
whether it supports variant capacity sets;
? the specification of test procedures related to
SDIF data streams.
This standard applies to the testing only of aspects
of SGML implementation and usage for which
objective conformance criteria are defined in
ISO 8879.
NOTE ? Among the aspects of an SGML system not
addressed by this standard are error recovery, phrasing
of error messages, application results, and
documentation (including the system declaration).