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).