CSS1 Test Suite
Acknowledgments
Through a combination of common interest and serendipity, three people became the driving forces behind the creation of the CSS1 Test Suite:
- Eric Meyer of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), who had created his own private test suite in order to create a set of compatibility charts for the Internet community's reference. The current test suite is very similar to Eric's original test pages; in effect, he took the existing set of test pages and modified them for public release by creating a new interface and by grafting other people's work onto his own. He served as Coordinator of the CSS1 Test Suite during its public revision phase (May 1998 - December 1998).
- Håkon Lie of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), co-author of the original CSS1 specification. During the creation of this test suite, he contributed invaluable insight into the specification and checked each page for correctness and completeness. In addition, Håkon contributed some general test pages and some good ideas on flagging conformance.
- Tim Boland of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who went to the effort of identifying more than five hundred testable statements in the CSS1 specification. Many of these statements were transferred directly into the final test suite, and much of Tim's work helped to verify that the test pages were correct in their assertions.
The CSS1 Test Suite was first opened for public comment in late April 1998, being housed on CWRU's Web server at that time. In early May 1998, the Suite was moved over to the W3C Web server and announced to the general public in a press release by the W3C. After a few months of revisions and corrections, the CSS1 Test Suite was declared completed in conjunction with the release of the revised CSS1 specification on 17 December 1998.
In addition to the three people mentioned above, the following people made various contributions to the project:
- The Cascading Style Sheets & Formatting Properties Working Group of the W3C, the members of whom gave much of their time and expertise to the improvement, expansion, and refinement of the tests found herein.
- The CSS Samurai of the Web Standards Project, who not only helped out with the improvement of this Suite, but also deserve thanks just for existing and fighting for CSS standards compliance.
- L. David Baron, who wrote large portions of the Section 4 tests, as well as made many improvements to the rest of the tests and ferreted out a large number of spelling errors, mistakes, and other flaws.
- Ian Hickson, for contributing the tests which eventually became the "LINK and @import" test in the Prologue. That page is a W3C-modified version of his original test page, and is re-used here with the kind permission of the author.
- Todd Fahrner of Studio Verso, author of the box model "acid test," which eventually became Test 5.5.26c. The version presented here is only slightly modified from Todd's work, and is re-used with the kind permission of the author.
- Bert Bos of the W3C, co-author of the CSS1 specification, who provided insight into CSS1's inner workings as well as many valuable suggestions.
- Chris Wilson of Microsoft, who prodded us into actually finishing the Test Suite.
- Tantek Çelik of Microsoft, who came up with the
TNG format improvement for separating the test suite pages into navigation and test pages and subsequently updated the test suite to use it, and has helped with minor edits to the test suite since 2001-04-23.
Without the help of these individuals, and all those who took time to send us their comments, suggestions, and concerns, the Test Suite would be far less than it is today. Our deepest thanks go to them all.
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