Re: FYI: "Test the Web Forward"

Hi Ivan,

On 31/10/2013 11:33 , Ivan Herman wrote:
> one minor (or not?) technical issue that came up at a discussion in
> Frankfurt is the 'driving' of the tests. I have not looked at the
> test suite right now, but I presume the tests are aimed at being run
> from a browser directly. That is of course fine for magazine and
> journal publishers, for example. But for book publishers (ie,
> readers) it may be a bit more complicated insofar as the natural
> 'environment' is an ebook reader rather than a browser, ie, what they
> consume is a book and not an html page. I am not sure what the
> smoothest way of interfacing the test suite would be then...

That is absolutely not minor and very much spot on. The test suite is at:

     https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/

It will of course always be a work in progress, but as things stand, 
even though it does have a lot of very good content, it still has quite 
a few rough edges.

One of those rough edges is how to run tests. Even in the "simple" 
browser case, that's not yet anywhere near as easy as we'd like it to 
be. We're working on making the harness much easier to use. (James 
Graham has some automation to show there.)

Hopefully, there is enough metadata in the tests (or rather, extracted 
from the conventions in use) that we could also generate epubs from it. 
There will certainly be some issues (I don't even know what the 
document.location is supposed to be inside a book, tests that check 
aspects related to origin and location might be either problematic or 
currently meaningless) but those can be worked through. That could be a 
topic for a Publishing TestTWF (and a further incentive for convergence :).

I'd be curious to see the results of the HTML parsing tests. I strongly 
suspect that most readers (at least the major ones) already parse 
(everything) as HTML instead of XHTML.

Another aspect that is also nascent is the use of WebDriver in order to 
automate tests, notably manual tests (since not everything can be 
directly automated). I am not aware of any reader currently able to be 
automated using WebDriver, but it would certainly be very useful for QA.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2013 11:03:18 UTC