Re: Followup to "Supergroups" message to AC Forum

On 22/06/2016 00:00, Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:

> Perhaps Daniel's experience is tainted by the issues the CSS WG had in
> attracting test submissions, especially for 2.1, but I think there's a
> lot of reasons why the CSS WG had so much trouble. 2.1 was problematic
> given most vendors don't have nicely organised test suites for the
> older standards to release in the first place, and later standards
> have been problematic because of the CSS WG's until recent policies on
> metadata which therefore vastly increased the cost of releasing test
> cases to what Members obviously found unacceptably high for the
> benefit it got them (the benefit was low for all but the smallest
> vendors, and the cost was relatively high).

It's of course true that what my track in the CSS WG has strongly
influenced my views on the matter, but no I was not thinking of 2.1.
Most of our specs suffer from the same issue for one good reason:
our tests are super-complicated to write, require deep knowledge
of not only the spec to test but also all other CSS specs because
of potential collisions/interactions. Even for Selectors, a Test
Suite I started myself, that are a spec a bit more isolated than the
others inside CSS, it took us years to complete it.

Testing a new device API with one new DOM interface having two methods
and two attributes is one thing. Testing flexbox or animations or
filters is going to be another story...

> If we want to do anything new, we should consider the fact that it's
> taken six years thus far to reach a point where half the major browser
> vendors are running web-platform-tests regularly (and we're likely to
> reach a majority within the next year), and starting from scratch will
> start that all over again—and there's likely to be more resistance as
> it's essentially duplicating something we already have.

Absolutely.

</Daniel>

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2016 04:43:21 UTC