Re: first-letter-punct-before-* tests unnecessarily hard to use

On 12/22/2010 09:18 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> The first-letter-punct-before family of tests are *extremely* hard to
> evaluate.  They require intensely scanning each line to look for a
> single 2px by 2px red square.  Even ignoring the size, red and green
> are similar in luminance, so the large amounts of (much higher
> luminance) white around each line makes the colors look similar unless
> you're paying very careful attention.  Because they can't be quickly
> skimmed, the couple of really long ones (particularly 019) are very
> hard to evaluate, as you can't easily keep track of exactly where you
> are while scrolling.
>
> This can be trivially fixed so that the tests are easy to skim and
> scrolling is still easy.
>
> 1. Make each square 20x20 instead of 2x2.
> 2. Remove the<hr>  between groups.
> 3. Put a thickish green border around and a green background beneath
> the whole set of things.
>
> #1 fixes the problem of the spots being tiny.  #2, and #3 fix the
> problem of there being white right next to the spots which can
> distract the eye.
>
> I manually fixed several of the pages to match these recommendations
> using Web Inspector while running the tests, and it made evaluation of
> them *infinitely* easier.  All the rest I still zoomed in to the
> maximum level on my browser, which counts as partially implementing
> #1, and it all by itself was a major usability win.

These tests are auto-generated via script. The original script
put all of the tests into one file, which turned the whole series
into a performance test. So I altered the script to split it into
multiple files.

If you want to alter the test or have the script create matching
references, the source is here:
   http://test.csswg.org/source/contributors/mozilla/submitted/first-letter-characters/

Post your patch here: if dbaron agrees with the change, check it in.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 27 December 2010 21:17:06 UTC