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This is a supporting document for authors of tests in the CSS2.1 test suite. It describes the key aspects of CSS tests, and gives various techniques authors should use when writing tests.
These guidelines were produced by members of the CSS working group which is part of the style activity (see summary).
Comments on, and discussions of this document can be sent on the (archived) public mailing list public-css-testsuite@w3.org (see instructions). W3C Members can also send comments directly to the CSS working group.
These guidelines represent the current thinking of the working group and as such may be updated, replaced or rendered obsolete by other W3C documents at any time. Its publication does not imply endorsement by the W3C membership or the CSS Working Group (members only).
Patent disclosures relevant to CSS may be found on the Working Group's public patent disclosure page.
This document explains how to write test cases for the CSS2.1 test suite.
A badly written test can lead to the tester not noticing a failure, as well as breaking the tester's concentration. Therefore it is important that the tests all be of a high standard.
Tests are viewed one after the other in quick succession, usually in groups of several hundred to a thousand. As such, it is important that the results be easy to interpret.
The tests should need no more than a few seconds to convey their results to the tester.
The tests should not need an understanding of the specification to be used.
Tests should be very short (a paragraph or so) and certainly not require scrolling on even the most modest of screens, unless the test is specifically for scrolling or paginating behaviour.
Unless specifically testing error-recovery features, the tests should all be valid.
Test should be as cross-platform as reasonably possible, working across different devices, screen resolutions, paper sizes, etc. Exceptions should document their assumptions.
Tests should follow the following template (see details):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>CSS Test: Description of test</title>
<link rel="author" title="Name of Author" href="Contact URI for Author (mailto or http)"/>
<link rel="help" href="http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/...#..."/>
<meta name="flags" content="Requirement flags" />
<meta name="assert" content="Assertion the test is trying to prove (optional)" />
<style type="text/css">
CSS for test
</style>
</head>
<body>
Content of test
</body>
</html>
The test suite will consist of the following kinds of tests:
Each test will contain one or more links to the relevant part of the specification:
<link rel="help" href="link to part of specification">
The first of these links will decide the position of the test in the test suite. The links will be ordered from rare to common such that the link to the rarest feature will be first.
The URIs will point to the /TR/CSS21/ spec (i.e. the "latest
version"), not to the version existing at the time of publication.
Basic and failure tests should limit themselves to <p>, <div>, <img>, and <span> elements. Other tests checking for the interaction of CSS with other XHTML elements, or elements from other namespaces, may include those other elements too.
If possible without compromising the test itself, block-level markup should be indented to show the structure of the document, as in the template given above.
When the document contains inline style attributes, then the following line should be added immediately after the title element in the markup:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"/>
When the document contains inline script (event handler) attributes, then the following line should be added immediately after the title element in the markup:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript"/>
If both are present, the Content-Style-Type header should be given first.
Tests should use UTF-8 unless the test is specifically checking encoding handling. If the XHTML 1.1 source files need to define a character set other than UTF-8 or UTF-16, then they will define their character set using an XML declaration, as in:
<?xml encoding="iso-8859-1"?/>
It is expected that there will be special cases, e.g. tests that check for the cascading order of multiple stylesheets. Those tests will be handled on a case-by-case basis. Support files will all be kept in one support directory, if possible.
Tests will be given a filename in a special format.
test-topic-###.ext
test-topictest-topic
should avoid conjunctions, articles, and prepositions. It is a filename,
not an English phrase: it should be as concise as possible.###extxht
(for XHTML).Well designed CSS tests typically fall into several categories, named after the features that the test will have when correctly rendered by a user agent.
Note: The terms "the test has passed" and "the test has failed" refer to whether the user agent has passed or failed a particular test — a test can pass in one web browser and fail in another. In general, the language "the test has passed" is used when it is clear from context that a particular user agent is being tested, and the term "this-or-that-user-agent has passed the test" is used when multiple user agents are being compared.
This is the simplest form of test, and is most often used when testing the parts of CSS that are independent of the rendering, like the cascade or selectors. Such tests consist of a single line of text describing the pass condition, which will be one of the following:
This line should be green. This line should have a green border. This line should have a green background.
Examples:
This is a variant on the green paragraph test. There are certain parts of CSS that will affect the entire page, when testing these this category of test may be used. Care has to be taken when writing tests like this that the test will not result in a single green paragraph if it fails. This is usually done by forcing the short descriptive paragraph to have a neutral color (e.g. white).
Example:
(This example is poorly designed, because it does not look red when it has failed.)
This is the best type of test for cases where a particular rendering rule is being tested. The test usually consists of two boxes of some kind that are (through the use of positioning, negative margins, zero line height, or other mechanisms) carefully placed over each other. The bottom box is colored red, and the top box is colored green. Should the top box be misplaced by a faulty user agent, it will cause the red to be shown. (These tests sometimes come in pairs, one checking that the first box is no bigger than the second, and the other checking the reverse.)
Examples:
These tests appear to be identical to the green paragraph tests mentioned above. In reality, however, they actually have more in common with the green block tests, but with the green block colored white instead. This type of test is used when the displacement that could be expected in the case of failure is likely to be very small, and so any red must be made as obvious as possible. Because of this, test would appear totally blank when the test has passed. This is a problem because a blank page is the symptom of a badly handled network error. For this reason, a single line of green text is added to the top of the test, reading something like:
This line should be green and there should be no red on this page.
Example:
It is often hard to make a test that is purely green when the test passes and visibly red when the test fails. For these cases, it may be easier to make a particular pattern using the feature that is being tested, and then have a reference rendering next to the test showing exactly what the test should look like.
The reference rendering could be either an image, in the case where the rendering should be identical, to the pixel, on any machine, or the same pattern made using totally different parts of the CSS specification. (Doing the second has the advantage of making the test a test of both the feature under test and the features used to make the reference rendering.)
Examples:
There are some cases where the easiest test to write is one where the four letters of the word 'PASS' are individually positioned on the page. This type of test is then said to have passed when all that can be seen is the word with all its letters aligned. Should the test fail, the letters are likely to go out of alignment, for instance:
PA SS
...or:
SSPA
The problem with this test is that when there is a failure it is sometimes not immediately clear that the rendering is wrong. (e.g. the first example above could be thought to be intentional.)
Example:
Ideal tests, as well as having well defined characteristics when they pass, should have some clear signs when they fail. It can sometimes be hard to make a test do something only when the test fails, because it is very hard to predict how user agents will fail! Furthermore, in a rather ironic twist, the best tests are those that catch the most unpredictable failures!
Having said that, here are the best ways to indicate failures:
This is probably the best way of highlighting bugs. Tests should be designed so that if the rendering is a few pixels off some red is uncovered.
Examples:
Tests of the 'line-height', 'font-size' and similar properties can sometimes be devised in such a way that a failure will result in the text overlapping.
Some properties lend themselves well to this kind of test, for example 'quotes' and 'content'. The idea is that if the word "FAIL" appears anywhere, something must have gone wrong.
Examples:
This is similar to using the word "FAIL", except that instead of (or in addition to) having the word "FAIL" appear when an error is made, the rest of the text in the test is generated using the property being tested. That way, if anything goes wrong, it is immediately obvious.
Examples:
These are in addition to those inherent to the various test types, e.g., differences in the two halves of a two identical renderings test obviously also shows a bug.
In addition to the techniques mentioned in the previous sections, there are some techniques that are important to consider or to underscore.
This technique should not be cast aside as a curiosity -- it is in fact one of the most useful techniques for testing CSS, especially for areas like positioning and the table model.
The basic idea is that a red box is first placed using one set of properties, e.g. the block box model's margin, height and width properties, and then a second box, green, is placed on top of the red one using a different set of properties, e.g. using absolute positioning.
This idea can be extended to any kind of overlapping, for example overlapping to lines of identical text of different colors.
Todd Fahrner has developed a font called Ahem, which consists of some very well defined glyphs of precise sizes and shapes. This font is especially useful for testing font and text properties. Without this font it would be very hard to use the overlapping technique with text.
Examples:
The font's em-square is exactly square. It's ascent and descent is exactly the size of the em square. This means that the font's extent is exactly the same as its line-height, meaning that it can be exactly aligned with padding, borders, margins, and so forth.
The font's alphabetic baseline is 0.2em above its bottom, and 0.8em below its top.
The font has four glyphs:
| X | U+0058 | A square exactly 1em in height and width. |
| p | U+0070 | A rectangle exactly 0.2em high, 1em wide, and aligned so that its top is flush with the baseline. |
| É | U+00C9 | A rectangle exactly 0.8em high, 1em wide, and aligned so that its bottom is flush with the baseline. |
| U+0020 | A transparent space exactly 1em high and wide. |
Most other US-ASCII characters in the font have the same glyph as X.
For tests that must be long (e.g. scrolling tests), it is important to make it clear that the filler text is not relevant, otherwise the tester may think he is missing something and therefore waste time reading the filler text. Good text for use in these situations is, quite simply, "This is filler text. This is filler text. This is filler text.". If it looks boring, it's working!
In general, using colors in a consistent manner is recommend. Specifically, the following convention has been developed:
Here is an example of blue being used:
There are particular parts of CSS that can be tested quite thoroughly with a very methodical approach. For example, testing that all the length units work for each property taking lengths is relatively easy, and can be done methodically simply by creating a test for each property/unit combination.
In practice, the important thing to decide is when to be methodical and when to simply test, in an ad hoc fashion, a cross section of the possibilities.
This example is a methodical test of the :not() pseudo-class with each attribute selector in turn, first for long values and then for short values:
Any manual test that is so long that is needs to be scrolled to be completed is too long. The reason for this becomes obvious when you consider how manual tests will be run. Typically, the tester will be running a program (such as "Loaderman") which cycles through a list of several hundred tests. Whenever a failure is detected, the tester will do something (such as hit a key) that takes a note of the test case name. Each test will be on the screen for about two or three seconds. If the tester has to scroll the page, that means he has to stop the test to do so.
Of course, there are exceptions -- the most obvious one being any tests that examine the scrolling mechanism! However, these tests are considered tests of user interaction and are not run with the majority of the tests.
In general, any test that is so long that it needs scrolling can be split into several smaller tests, so in practice this isn't much of a problem.
This is an example of a test that is too long:
As mentioned many times in this document, red indicates a bug, so nothing should ever be red in a test.
There is one important exception to this rule... the test for the 'red' value for the color properties!
The first subtest on this page shows this problem:
A test that has half a sentence of normal text with the second half bold if the test has passed is not very obvious, even if the sentence in question explains what should happen.
There are various ways to avoid this kind of test, but no general rule can be given since the affected tests are so varied.
The last subtest on this page shows this problem:
[acknowledgments]