Testsuite flags

(Bcc'd public-css-testsuite; can we please keep responses on a single
mailing list, in this case www-style as it's about a WG resolution?)

At the F2F in May, we decided to do this on the list, so, uh, here goes:

We currently have a whole load of flags, documented over at
<http://testthewebforward.org/docs/css-metadata.html>:

* ahem
* animated
* asis
* combo
* dom
* font
* history
* HTMLonly
* http
* image
* interact
* invalid
* may
* namespace
* nonHTML
* paged
* scroll
* should
* speech
* svg
* userstyle
* 32bit
* 96dpi

I believe we have rough consensus to drop:

* ahem
* http
* image
* namespace
* svg
* 32bit
* 96dpi

ahem is something we should just rely on as an assumption for the whole
testsuite (this is the status-quo for web-platform-tests)

http is redundant as we move to .headers files and away from .htaccess,
as you can trivially statically determine the property

image, namespace, and svg are all catering for theoretical UAs that
don't implement the respective features.

32bit is similar, insofar as nobody is aware of any current UA that
doesn't use 32bit integers everywhere.

96dpi has been entirely redundant since CSS 2.1 defined 1 CSS inch to
equal 96px.

In addition to this, once we drop the build system, asis, HTMLonly, and
nonHTML can be nuked because they become meaningless, as they exist only
to control it.

This leaves us with:

* animated
* combo
* dom
* font
* history
* interact
* invalid
* may
* paged
* scroll
* should
* speech
* userstyle

Now, without rough consensus:

I think we should drop combo. We added it for the sake of CR-exit
criteria and because we had some tests that were just the sum of others.
We probably can use case-by-case judgement better than we can the flag
to do anything here.

I think we can drop dom, because script can be statically detected
easily enough (i.e., is there a <script> element?). I think Florian had
some edge-case he was concerned with around here? (I want to say that
was as far back as TPAC last year he mentioned that to me!)

I'd like to drop font, and vastly reduce the number of tests that
require fonts to be installed by just relying on @font-face more (I hope
we've reached a point where we can rely on it now!). Obviously we can't
completely eliminate having to install fonts, but we can make it rare.

I'm also going to point out that as we try and converge on
web-platform-tests policies we're going to end up requiring "-manual"
filename suffixes on all tests flagged with animated, font, history,
interact, paged, speech, or userstyle. We may want to drop some of these
prior to that, however (or rather, more likely, say "these are
deprecated and should be treated identically to interact").

/gsnedders

Received on Thursday, 18 August 2016 04:48:46 UTC