[no subject]

  Implementers are expected to write their own test harness that
  implements the following tasks:

  * Read test cases from the catalog, apply customization if
    applicable (see below)
  * Execute tests, using source files specified in the catalog
  * Use appropriate comparator to match result
  * Produce categorization of test result (pass, fail etc.,
    see below)

I wonder how result comparison can be achieved, as this has to be
done by the driver. Further down, under "Comparing Results":

  The test harness must canonicalize both, the actual result
  and the expected result according to the "Canonical XML"
  recommendation [2], which refers to a number of open-source
  implementations. Byte-comparison can then be applied to the
  resulting XML documents.

Sounds reasonable. But can we expect an XSLT 1.0 implementation to
comply to the "Canonical XML" recommendation?

> The W3C XSLT test suite is exactly the same, except that neither
> the catalog format nor the test cases are published outside W3C.
> 
> The "framework" is thus essentially the catalog format. I don't
> think there would be any problem in publishing the catalog format
> (syntax and semantics) used by the W3C XSLT test suite, it's only
> the actual tests that are problematic.

Well, if the XSLT catalog is different from the published XQuery
catalog, why not use it as the base of an open test suite for XSLT?

Michael Ludwig