Re: WebPlatform Browser Support Info

On Friday, October 18, 2013 at 9:56 AM, Niels Leenheer wrote:
> On Oct 18, 2013, at 12:23 AM, Tobie Langel <tobie@w3.org (mailto:tobie@w3.org)> wrote:
> > We've been using spec URLs to link features to test cases so far (e.g. the test for the XmlHttpRequest abort method[1] links to the abort method of the XHR spec[2]) why not continue using that method?
> > 
> > Likewise, test cases could be identified by their URL.
> I already have have a spec URL for each of my tests. So this would would work well for me. But how do we deal with changes to the specs? It is not uncommon for URLs to change too.

These section level URLs are usually kept rather consistent across spec revisions, so this really only becomes an issue when the tests are drifting out of sync with the spec, in which case you already have a bunch of other problems.
> > Finally, I'm not sure I understand the benefit of identifying browsers by UUID. (Aren't user agent strings good enough for that?) For a coarser (and more useful) picture, won't version strings do?
> 
> Using the user agent string is not really useful. It is sometimes not specific enough, at other times far too specific and sometimes completely wrong.

I'm not advocating using UA strings to organize the results for display, but to uniquely identify the browser on which the test was run. This let's you then use a UA string parser of the desired coarseness to display results. If we don't want to store UA strings, we should agree on browser names rather than use UUID, in which case I'd strongly advocate relying on the the names used by Browser Scope's UA parser[1] which is fully open-sourced. Disclaimer, I co-lead the project.

Overall, while I applaud this standardization effort, I feel like the proposition is over complex. I'd suggest deriving a standard notation from implementation requirements and with the goal of providing a nice, palatable API rather than by starting from standardization.

Best,

--tobie
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[1]: https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser

Received on Friday, 18 October 2013 09:26:26 UTC