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

On Aug 6, 2013, at 12:40 PM, James Graham wrote:

> On 2013-08-06 11:39, Peter Linss wrote:
>> On Aug 6, 2013, at 11:14 AM, James Graham wrote:
> 
>>> 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).
> 
> So essentially all this complexity is to support non-web use cases? That seems unfortunate.

Sorry, but web technologies are used in places outside browsers, that doesn't make it "non-web". It's also not unfortunate that this happens, it's a good thing. Pretending those use cases don't exist is unfortunate.

But that's all beside the point, we're not actually going out of our way to support "non-web" use cases, we're supporting getting our specs to REC. The fact that it takes implementations other than browsers to do that _is_ unfortunate, but it's what we have had to do, and will continue to need to do for some time yet. If you can guarantee implementations of all of CSS in two browsers, I'd be happy to drop these extra requirements. The day we can do that will be a good day.

Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2013 21:39:36 UTC