Re: Test for :first-letter punctuation extension

L. David Baron wrote:
> Attached are two files that I'm contributing to the CSS 2.1 test
> suite.  The story behind them is a little complicated, though.
> 
> In the tests that Microsoft contributed, there are 412 tests, named
> first-letter-punctuation-001.xht through
> first-letter-punctuation-412.xht , which are extremely repetitive.
> I don't think it's appropriate to have such repetitive tests in a
> manual test suite, because of the costs in time of both reviewing
> and running them.
> 
> This test is an attempt to put all of those tests in a single file
> that can be easily verified at a quick glance.  Furthermore, this
> test also attempts to test the negative:  that any characters not in
> the punctuation classes given do not cause extension of the string
> covered by the :first-letter pseudo-element.
> 
> This means the resulting test is extremely large, and loads very
> slowly.  It's also failing, for a few characters, in all the
> browsers I've tried it in.  I haven't yet analyzed if that's a bug
> in the test (e.g., making assumptions that it can't make about
> certain whitespace characters) or a bug in the browsers in question,
> though I suspect it's a bug in the test.
> 
> However, I wanted to get the test contributed before the September
> 15 deadline even though it's incomplete.  So, attached are:
> 
>  1) an HTML file that is the beginning of the test
>  2) a python script to generate the large part of the test file (the
>     hardcoded path in it should be changed to the location of the
>     appropriate file from the Unicode 5.1.0 character database),
>     which should replace the last 6 lines of (1)

I think combining some of those 400+ :first-letter pseudo-element
tests is a good idea, but can we break this up so that it's not
all one huge file? One of the criteria for CSS2.1 tests is that
they have to be *short*: the goal here is to test :first-letter
correctness, not to stress-test mobile devices.

Another problem is that the file is not valid XHTML. (It's not
even well-formed XHTML.) The build scripts will choke on that.
Also, it appears from the source that this is a visual verification
test, but there are no instructions.

Using a script to generate this test is fine; we have other tests
that need a pre-build process. But the other three issues make the
test unusable as-is.

r- fantasai

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 24 September 2009 00:07:06 UTC