Re: Towards a better testsuite: Metadata

> On Apr 12, 2016, at 02:56, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> 
> 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 am not interested in making a distinction between a short title and a complete description. I only want the complete description, and worry we won't get it if we call it title.

> 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.

I agree with that goal to, and I am not quite sure what to do about the tension between these two positions. What you suggest is probably the way forward, but it still feels a bit wrong.

Titles are mandatory, and we don't care about titles, but we care about something else, so let's just stuff it in the title. I can live with it, but it rubs me the wrong way.

 - Florian

Received on Tuesday, 12 April 2016 01:24:53 UTC