Re: Towards a better testsuite: Metadata

On 04/11/2016 03:55 AM, ishida@w3.org wrote:
> On 11/04/2016 01:56, Florian Rivoal wrote:
>> Works for me. The only point I am not 100% sure about is putting the assertion/explanation in the title, as I think people
>> have expectations that a title should be a few words, rather than one or two full sentences, and I worry a bit that this set
>> up will give us under-described tests.
>
> I very much agree. I think that assertions in the title will become a very unwieldy in many cases (eg. where you have to say
> "If such-and-such, then so-and-so will happen."), and lead to unhelpful brevity in others.
>
> For me the assert field is a top priority.
>
> I find the titles useful to give a quick idea of the intent of the test (see for example the distinction at
> https://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/the-lang-attribute).  But i wonder whether we can make the title optional
> - if needed, but missing, it may be possible to use the file name as the title.

That was my intention when we drew up the metadata documentation,
but it seems that a lot of people find the metadata confusing to
write and are annoyed at the amount of markup it requires. And
I can't say I blame them; there's enough that even I can't write
a new test off the top of my head if I haven't looked things up
recently enough.

<title> tags are structurally simple. They're also required for
the HTML to be valid, so we have to have one anyway.
   https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-head-element

If we'd like to make a distinction between a "title" and a longer
"description", then maybe we can adopt a convention similar to
commit messages: the first line, if it stands alone, is the title,
and the rest is the description.

I'd rather keep the metadata and its markup as simple as possible.
It should be easy to write a new test from a blank page once you've
written 2-3. It should therefore require as little typing and
memorization as possible; and <meta> tags don't facilitate this at
all because they're noisy.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 11 April 2016 17:56:35 UTC