Minutes: MathML Core meeting 14 October, 2024

 Louis wasn't able to make it to the meeting so they are far from his
standard of note taking...
These are very rough notes.

Attendees:
Brian Kardell
Neil Soiffer
David Carlisle
Deyan Ginev
Paul Libbrech
Harry Chen
Moritz Schubotz


Harry Chen joined us, and we did a round of introductions. Harry is part of
Igalia and is doing some work on MathML.

BK: Don't worry about making a PR -- everyone gets feedback on a
submission, even frequent contributors.

BK: There are about 3200 math tests. The MathML tests are inside of a
mathml subdirectory, but categorization is not precise. For example, there
are CSS tests inside of the mathml subdirectory.

BK: Don't worry about whether you are creating a duplicate test.

BK: There are two kinds of tests: ref tests and regular ("test harness")
tests. Ref tests have a link to a reference page for comparison. That page
should use very basic things such as divs and css. The math ref tests often
just are "is there only a green box on the page"?

BK: There are things in the header that need to be there including `<meta
name="assert" content="...."/>. That says what the test is about.

BK: the reference harness tests have a "compareLayout" which takes the
content bounding box and compares the top/left/right/bottom.

DG: How do I make sure that the test passes on my own machine?

BK: lots of good info is at these links:

   - info about forking github:
   https://web-platform-tests.org/writing-tests/submission-process.html
   - writing tests:https://web-platform-tests.org/writing-tests.html
   - running tests:
   https://web-platform-tests.org/running-tests/from-local-system.html#system-setup


DG: What can you actually do? Can you test the actual pixels?

BK: Yes, but that's frowned upon because it is iffy because things may vary
slightly.

BK: Many of the MathML tests are ref tests

NS: How do we know whether to combine similar things or break them up? For
example, I can think of 12 tests for italic correction. Should they all be
together or broken up?

BK: Probably together, but don't worry. The reviewers will let you know if
they feel it should be broken up or combined.

BK: There is an IRC to ask questions about tests:
https://matrix.to/#/#wpt:matrix.org