- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 12:34:40 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Cc: Thomas Scholz <info@scholz-webdesign.de>, www-style@w3.org
On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Philip TAYLOR wrote: >> >> One of the prerequisistes for the test suite will be setting the >> default colours to black text on white background, link colours to blue >> and visited colours to purple, default font size to 16 pixels, >> resolution to 96dpi, and various other such changes. If tests had to >> handle all the various different kinds of setups, they would become >> ridiculously complicated and require support for much more before being >> able to test anything at all. > > I have to confess, I don't understand this : there will be many, many > potential testers who do not have their browsers configured to meet > these requirements You can't get reproducable results from testing without consistent starting conditions. > why can the tests not start by defining settings for the BODY and/or > HTML regions which establishe this environment and by displaying > introductory material which can be used to verify that the pre-test > criteria are now met Because there are so many of them. You'd end up with dozens of rules just setting up the initial conditions, and if anything was buggy in anything that depended on, you'd have to throw away the whole suite. You'd also be unable to test things like initial values. > Surely one of the main points of the tests is to ensure that /no matter > how/ a user may have elected to configure his/her browser, certain > effects can be reliably accomplished using CSS ? That's certainly one of the things we want to test, but it's better tested by specific tests, I think. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Saturday, 24 July 2004 08:34:41 UTC