Re: Ringmark, Core Mobile, and the Financial Times

On 06/13/2012 11:35 AM, Robin Berjon wrote:
> On Jun 12, 2012, at 23:32 , Arthur Barstow wrote:

>> WRT the former, if testharness.js is considered a blocker, related
>> comments, flames, etc. should be sent to public-test-infra@w3.org
>> (unless James suggests otherwise).
>
> Is testharness.js considered hard? My personal experience is that
> that may be true but not its fault. If you've used another testing
> framework such as Jasmine or Mocha before, I reckon it ought to be
> reasonably easy to pick it up. The syntax differs but the concepts
> are all pretty much the same.

I think one difference is that testharness.js is explicitly designed to 
be primitive in certain respects; for example it doesn't try to invent 
its own abstractions for writing async tests in the same way as say 
qunit or mocha, but expects you to use the browser event loop directly. 
This is pretty essential when it is details of the event loop that you 
are trying to test, but is maybe surprising for people who are used to 
working with higher-abstraction libraries.

> There isn't much we can do about that — it's not as if there weren't
> already loads of testing advocacy going on. Perhaps the only thing
> that can make testharness.js easier on people would be better docs?
> Perhaps something along the lines of what the Jasmine folks recently
> did: http://pivotal.github.com/jasmine/. Not only is it a good
> tutorial, it's also runnable.

"Better docs" is hard to say no to :) And it would of course be nice to 
have a website for testing that looks like it was designed sometime this 
decade to give the impression that W3C testing isn't some unapproachable 
academic discipline but is warm and fuzzy and modern.

I can help with the former of course, but am totally the wrong person to 
do the latter.

> I think that making the Test Tzar for a spec right up there with the
> Editor ought to be a requirement in all specs. "Test Contributors"
> sounds secondary though. If you can find me a good name for it, I'll
> add support for it to ReSpec post-haste. Conformance Lead? It should
> be something that can shine on a CV.

WebApps has a notion of "test facilitator" (not the most glamorous 
title, perhaps). Listing that person on the spec doesn't seem like a bad 
idea.

Received on Friday, 15 June 2012 08:25:15 UTC