Re: Some draft code for mobileOK Basic Tests RI

On 2/6/07, Dominique Hazael-Massieux <dom@w3.org> wrote:
> Le lundi 05 février 2007 à 09:57 -0500, James G Pearce a écrit :
> > One idea we had was to try to aim to describe as many of the tests as
> > possible in a language-agnostic way. The test descriptions could be
> > picked up at run time. This would have a number of advantages:
> >
> >  * Easier porting of the engine (it's just a test interpreter)
> >
> >  * Decoupling the implementation from any changes made to the tests
> > themselves
> >
> >  * Makes it easy for 3rd parties to add additional tests (at least
> > those which can be described in that way).
>
> I think that's a good approach, but I think it's fairly clear it won't
> be applicable to all tests; for instance, I don't think we can easily
> use a declarative approach for describing constraints on CSS rules
> (which unfortunately require more work than simply detecting whether a
> given rule exists, but also whether and how it applies). Similarly, I
> don't think we can detect whether a GIF or JPEG file is valid or not, or
> whether the encoding of a page is properly encoded or not.

I tend to agree with Dom that there is probably not enough in common
between the tests for us to describe each with a meta-language that is
not quite complex itself. I do wholeheartedly agree that we should use
standard tools and approaches, like XPath, to aid portability. I kind
of thought this was what James was describing to begin with.

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2007 18:37:29 UTC