- From: James F. Carter <jimc@math.ucla.edu>
- Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 10:41:04 -0800 (PST)
- To: "Shane P. McCarron" <shane@aptest.com>
- cc: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, www-html-testsuite@w3.org
I'm sorry to have not been very active in this project, but a number of pressing matters came up. I'll try to be more timely in future. If you would like to have a look, I have some material at http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/html40-test/index.html I went through the HTML-4.0 spec and tried to put together one of everything. Mostly I bypassed CSS style effects in favor of deprecated tags and attributes, though a few CSS effects are illustrated. As the intended audience was not the worldwide community, my texts lack some items (like section references for everything) which in retrospect I probably should have put in (and probably will put in). Also, I suspect that I have identified some tags as inline when the standard actually intends them to be block level. And the material tests HTML-4.0 and has not been updated for XHTML. Shane's tool sounds good, in which the test document is actually a form and it is backed by a CGI that accumulates user judgements on each test. However I see one problem with that method: if the test suite is hosted on W3C's server the CGI deposits the results on W3C's server, to which the user has no access. You would have to download the test suite (with its CGI) and install it on your own server, which is completely appropriate for a developer such as Netscape, but which couldn't be managed by students or third parties evaluating browsers. I wonder if this would be possible -- I'm no Java expert so I suspect it would work but don't know. The toplevel page of the test suite takes you into a Java applet (or better, ECMAscript/Javascript, because paranoid people avoid Java but may be convinced to tolerate Javascript for an important purpose). In a text field on the toplevel page (or put up by the applet) the user provides a mail address. The applet persists throughout testing (assuming the browser doesn't crash, a definite possibility in a test suite) and interprets "submit" button presses on each page, mailing the form content to the user, one message per page. It's nasty, but it gets the results off the web server. As an alternative, conceivably the applet could be given the name of a file on the browser machine, but no sane person would voluntarily allow Java to write, much less read, an arbitrary file. James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Internet: jimc@math.ucla.edu (finger for PGP key) UUCP:...!{ucsd,ames,ncar,gatech,purdue,rutgers,decvax,uunet}!math.ucla.edu!jimc On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Shane P. McCarron wrote: > That is how our current framework works (the ApTest one). For each test, > you select a result and provide notes. The notes are accumulated in a > test-session specific bucket so that they are 1) private to the user, > and 2) you can see how the results evolve.
Received on Thursday, 14 December 2000 13:41:08 UTC