I think that this is an excellent approach. It unfortunately still
involves someone eyeballing it. (I understand that with some effort we
could devise a system that did this auto-magically, but I'm not sure
it is worth it.)
I have a concern.
We all know that every rendering engine has it's own quirks and while
cross-browser pixel perfect designs are do-able, they take extra
effort and often browser specific code or hacks. In many cases,
especially web applications, an acceptable strategy is to accept that
some variation will occur and as long as the page is usable and
esthetically consistent on that browser then it's OK, even if it
doesn't agree with some other browser.
The overlay approach should also be paired with a policy that outlines
what is an "acceptable variation" between browsers.
<huge generalization>One of the advantage of the Web 2.0 esthetic of
"less-visual-design" is that it has much more room for variations
between rendering engines.</huge generalization>
- Eli
On Jan 27, 2009, at 10:31 AM, Jacob Farber wrote:
Hi Everyone,
The past while it has become more and more pressing that FSS has
some form of testing. Through some research and long discussions it
has become evident that this is not going to be easy. Some ideas
bounced around were automated image comparisons and programmatic CSS
parsing but no solution was feasable within our time-constraints and
nothing completely removed the need for someone to just open a page
and see if it "just looked right".
On that note, Justin and I were thinking perhaps a wireframe overlay
on top of special test page would suffice for now. The wireframe
would look something like an outline like Adobe Illustrators
"outline" mode, and it would layer itself on top of the test page
content. If the wireframe and the content beneath it didnt match up
perfectly, you would know something is broken right away and bug
could be logged. To complement this test page, a series of smaller
pages would be available to test very specific chunks of the FSS
CSS. This second part would help us pinpoint where specific problems
lie.
Any thoughts or ideas?
Thanks
Jacob
--
Jacob Farber
University of Toronto - ATRC
Tel: (416) 946-3002
www.fluidproject.org
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
Eli Cochran
user interaction developer
ETS, UC Berkeley
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