Re: HTML5 Test Suite

On 02/16/2011 01:45 AM, David Jackson wrote:
> Is there a downloadable application or web service that allows running
> of the suite of HTML5 tests from W3C against other browsers? The limited
> list posted on the W3C HTML5 Test Suite site includes the recent IE9 RC
> compared with older versions of Firefox, Chrome and Webkit, and contains
> no information about Opera standards support. It would be helpful in
> making browser choice decisions to be able to assess progress toward
> HTML5 support, and I am interested in the browser development
> competition as well.

The HTML5 testsuite is currently not nearly complete enough to make any 
reasonable inferences from the results (the only part with at-all 
reasonable coverage is the canvas tests). It is also primarily a tool 
for helping browser developers fix and find bugs and simple-minded 
analysis of the results (e.g. X is better than Y because it got a higher 
percentage) will be highly misleading (it says nothing about how 
difficult the bugs are to fix, or how significant bugs are).

If you want to help browsers develop better standards support, the best 
thing is not to *run* the tests but to *contribute* towards them. If you 
are interested in doing that, the best thing to do is pick a part of the 
specification that you think needs to be tested and start writing tests. 
There is some documentation at [1], but it is probably incomplete. If 
you are interested and need help #whatwg on Freenode irc is a good place 
to ask for it (there is also a W3C irc server but it tends to be 
lower-traffic).

[1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/Testing

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2011 12:37:57 UTC