Re: Consolidating css-wg and web-platform-tests repositories (Was: test suite meta data)

On Aug 6, 2013, at 11:14 AM, James Graham wrote:

> On 2013-08-06 11:02, Peter Linss wrote:
>> On Aug 5, 2013, at 10:02 AM, Tobie Langel wrote:
> 
>>> 2) afaik vendors pull the repo directly when they wish to run the tests (rather then use the output of a build system).
>> not in HTML?
>> The output of the build system is still used for CSS tests,
>> historically (and currently to the best of my knowledge) people mostly
>> consume the build output of our test suites, not the source. And FWIW,
>> there are other people who run tests aside from vendors.
>> The build system isn't something the CSSWG can throw away at this
>> point. We use it for test format conversions, many of our test suites
>> are contributed in a mix of XHTML and HTML, and we need the full
>> suites in both HTML and XHTML formats, we've also relied on
>> XHTML-Print. In addition, the build system produces manifest files and
>> human readable test suite indexes, which are also being used.
> 
> Where does the requirement to have the full suite in multiple formats come from? It seems unlikely that the CSS layer in browsers would depend on the parser that was originally used. Do you have examples of tests that found bugs when run in XML but not in HTML?
> 

It's not so much to test a browser's behavior in both input formats, but to make the suite available for clients that don't support one format or the other. Clients which we needed to exit CR for CSS2.1 and will likely need again for other specs. For example, some of the implementations are offline XHTML to PDF converters or XHTML-Print renderers embedded in printers. This is particularly true for paged-media CSS features that are generally poorly supported in browsers (but I'd be more than happy if we could rely on browsers to pass those tests).

Another example of a format conversion that's been requested (and some experimental work done on) is converting stand-alone SVG files to SVG in HTML (and vice-versa) to expose SVG tests to various clients.

And FWIW, some bits of CSS do need to be tested against XHTML or HTML parsers specifically, like case-sensitivity of attribute selectors, but those generally have dedicated XHTML or HTML tests.

Peter

Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2013 18:38:59 UTC