Re: aria test files using html4 doctype

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 8:02 PM, Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org> wrote:
>   
>> We made an explicit decision to do ARIA testing using HTML 4.
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/CR-wai-aria-20110118/#sotd_exit
>>
>> The technical folks can give a better explanation of the reasons. My
>> recollection was we wanted to test on a stable host language in which ARIA
>> is "unknown" so we could focus solely on user agent behaviour.
>>     
>
> Is this something we can revisit?
>   
This is not something we can revisit mid-stream in the middle of ARIA
Candidate Recommendation testing. We have good reasons for using HTML 4,
but the techies will have to be the ones to explain them.
> Can we not just fork the tests as part of HTML5 testing?
>   
Perhaps I need to understand more about the use cases you're looking at.
Are you looking at using the ARIA tests to test that component of HTML
5? That is a project we were expecting to support when the time came,
but I hadn't heard that time had come. Are you looking at some other
testing project?

By "forking" tests, do you mean creating tests that are substantially
similar to the existing tests, but using HTML 5? That is something that
can be done. A good portion of the current ARIA tests are automatically
generated and I'm willing to generate HTML 5 versions of those. The
question would be where (in which repository) to put them - in the PFWG
repository, the HTML WG repository, or somewhere else? As far as the
tests that aren't automatically generated, there would be a manual
process involved, unless someone wants to run a script on them and hope
it works. I'm not prepared to add that to my personal plate in the near
future, but can help out with logistics if someone else wants to do it.
It would be best, in my opinion, to find some way to tie the tests
together so two given test files are known to be HTML 4 and HTML 5
flavours of each other, but I don't have a proposal for how to do that
in the short term. Keeping the same naming pattern for existing tests
helps but is brittle.

Note we're still creating ARIA test files so the job wouldn't be "done"
until we finish that. And we haven't even begun doing "QA" tests, e.g.,
testing all the potential failure conditions etc. We've only focused so
far on tests necessary to demonstrate interoperability for CR.

Michael
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
>   

-- 

Michael Cooper
Web Accessibility Specialist
World Wide Web Consortium, Web Accessibility Initiative
E-mail cooper@w3.org <mailto:cooper@w3.org>
Information Page <http://www.w3.org/People/cooper/>