On May 20, 2008, at 7:51 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
On Wed, 21 May 2008, Sylvain Pasche wrote:
I'm working on an experimental project to build a set of cross
browser
automated tests. The idea would be to have a repository of browser
independent automated tests. Existing test suites could be imported
into
it.
Would WHATWG be interested in such a project?
I think that would be great; if you do go ahead with this, you are
welcome
to use the WHATWG wiki and other resources. I encourage you to use the
implementors mailing list for this:
http://www.whatwg.org/mailing-list#imps
To meet these goals, such an API should be as unobtrusive as
possible:
* One .js file to include
I recommend not embedding any JS, but instead requiring that the
following
two lines be used to report results (or something like them):
if (parent.reportResults)
parent.reportResults(...);
...and using <iframe>s to embed the tests one after another. I use
something similar for my performance tests:
http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/perf/
This makes the test even easier to maintain, and also makes it a lot
easier to reimplement the harness or to share tests between
hardnesses.
This approach would not be so good for the WebKit regression test
harness, which loads pages one at a time in an offscreen window
without any use of frames.
Our regression test framework can run large numbers of tests
significantly faster than any browser-based harness I know of, and it
would be nice if any shared pool of regression tests could be
compatible with it.
WebKit's test setup is actually pretty advanced and can test many
things that one might expect to require user interaction or a central
web server, such as event handling, back/forward history, window
opening, cross-site security, drag and drop, XMLHttpRequest in the
face of different server behavior, etc.
Regards,
Maciej
