What's the advantage? While a common protocol at first glance sounds nice, I'd imagine the devil and validity of any test is in the actual implementation. So TAP, as far as I can tell is just a BDD spec.. which basically just amounts to some lines of text for someone to write BDD against.

Am I missing something? I was actually recently looking into BDD-like tools recently, so I feel like I'm a potential user for TAP, but I just can't grok the value add in it offhand.

edit: oh, maybe TAP is the inverse of what I was thinking. It's about output of test suites, for common post-test tooling? Aka to give statuses about the state of tests?