Re: [webcomponents] Closed flag proposal breaks ability to audit and automate tests of web pages (#354)

> There is nothing that prevents authors from exposing shadow DOM via JavaScript. e.g. you can add shadowRoot property on the shadow host during the testing.

This means that you have different code when testing and when running in production. This is anything but a best practice

> The whole point of this flag is so that components can enforce the encapsulation as they wish.

I am struggling to understand why components NEED to enforce this level of encapsulation. Note: encapsulation is enforced by the rest of the spec. This just makes it impossible, instead of difficult, to look inside a component. Why do we need to make it impossible? What features of the web will be impossible to create is we do not have this feature?


>In the case of debugging and testing, each component should be either:
>
>made by the page author in which case the author can expose the shadow root during testing,
provided by a third party in which case standards compliance, accessibility, and other kinds of testing should be done separately.

Unfortunately this excludes one very necessary type of testing and that is acceptance testing. It is often necessary for people doing acceptance testing (of which accessibility audits are a small piece) to verify whether the deliverable being given to them meets their requirements. It is not acceptable for them to accept the statement of the developer because this does not (in the case of accessibility) in any way free the organization from the legal obligation that it be accessible.

This means that organizations who are not the developers of a component must test its accessibility when they use it and often, organizations who are  not the developer of the entire application in which a component is included and where the developer of the application is yet a different third party must validate the entire application.

If we do not allow these organizations access to the most efficient means of testing (both for accessibility and for functionality), then we are making the development of web applications more expensive because we are forcing them to resort to manual testing.

In today's environment, any time we force an organization to resort to manual testing, we are driving up the cost of quality assurance and erecting barriers to quality web applications. The Web Components group of specs (which relies on this spec) is supposed to make development of rich Web-based applications easier, not harder.

The closed flag currently takes us backwards both in the area of automated testing and in the area of accessibility.

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