Saxon-SA is the commercial version of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor. The product runs on both the Java and .NET platforms; these results apply to the Java version.
Queries were run as supplied, with no changes made to accommodate the test driver.
The test driver is written in XSLT 2.0, as a transformation that takes the catalog as its principal input, and generates the result listing as its primary output. Results of individual queries are generated as secondary outputs. Some Saxon XSLT extensions are used within the driver, for example try/catch to catch errors in test queries, and the Saxon mechanisms for calling external Java functions are used to invoke query compilation and execution.
XML comparisons are performed using the saxon:deep-equal() extension function. This is an extended version of the standard deep-equal() function that allows control over the details of the comparison. The options used are "NPCS": this takes into account namespace nodes, processing instructions, and comments, and compares nodes using their string value rather than their typed value. This is believed to be equivalent to the canonicalization procedure described in the test specification. The invocation of saxon:deep-equal() is adjusted so that a document node is considered equal to its immediate element child. In the case where results differ only by whitespace, the test is recorded as a pass and a comment is recorded to this effect; however this hardly happens in the latest version of the test suite.
Fragment and text comparisons are performed by wrapping the reference results in a dummy element node, parsing the result, and then performing a saxon:deep-equal() comparison that ignores this wrapper node.
If the expected result is an error, and the test produces an error, then it is reported as having been run successfully even if the error codes differ. In all cases where the error codes differ from those expected, this is recorded as a comment in the test report.
Tests of the trivial XQuery embedding have not been run because they would require extra work in the test driver and would prove nothing. The Saxon API enables applications to implement the trivial embedding at application level, even though there is no explicit support for it in the Saxon product.