Re: Requirements for (level >=3) tests

2012/2/16 "Gérard Talbot" <css21testsuite@gtalbot.org>:
> I disagree with you.

Okay.

> XHTML tests are not served as text/html in the test suite.

Correct.  This just means that you're using a different code path from
virtually every web page, which is undesirable in a test suite.  Tests
should be text/html because web pages are all text/html, for practical
purposes.

> XHTML insures well-formedness.

This begs the question.  Why do we want well-formedness?  HTML parsing
has been well-defined for several years now.

> What's so difficult in using a HTML document template anyway? Most text
> editors can be customized to start with a HTML document template.

It's harder to read.  As in, several times as long, with most of the
markup being boilerplate that serves no purpose.  It's processed
exactly the same by all browsers, and the relevant standards guarantee
that.  The HTML5 version of the same file is two lines long and
contains nothing except the actual style information relevant to the
test, except the doctype.

> The whole thing sends a wrong message to web authors out there that web
> standards are not important to follow, web standards bring no benefits,
> are useless anyway, pointless, etc.. Web authors could now look at the
> tests and say: "Look, even W3C in the test suites does not follow the
> web standards it creates."

HTML5 is a W3C-hosted specification, and the test file I gave is valid
HTML5 (except that it's missing a <title>, okay).  XHTML 1.0 is a
specification that's more than a decade old, is exceptionally vague in
specifying everything except syntax, and isn't actually used on a
nontrivial number of real-world websites (given that pages served as
text/html are actually processed by browsers as HTML5 regardless of
doctype).  Using it in preference to HTML5 sends the message that the
W3C cares more about theoretical purity than about actual browser
interoperability.  Which, unfortunately, seems to be true.

Received on Thursday, 16 February 2012 18:39:21 UTC