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Sunday, April 05, 2009

XML DOM Support Test

After getting over a nasty cold, I'm just clearing off my old "shelf" so I can get back to work.

I don't have time to work on it now, but I wanted to put the beginnings of an XML Support Test (true XHTML form only at this point, so won't work in IE) here in case anyone were interested in building off of it, comment on it, etc., as well as for my own future reference.

Basically, inspired by web tests like Acid, I was hoping we XML and XHTML afficianados could stimulate better compliance from the browsers (including the "good" ones who normally try to adhere to standards but who still can fall short out of a perceived lack of community interest, or frankly their own occasional tendencies to "exceptionalism"), by having a test to highlight support for the DOM focused on XML features, up to DOM Level 3 (Acid seems to be covering a lot of the rest of the DOM, at least levels 1 and 2).

While the Acid test preparers have a high level of expertise both in awareness of the standards and creating a clever and appealing test output, for now at least, my own plan is just going to be to start with a simple chart, and hope that others may offer feedback and/or code as time goes on. No guarantees about how much time I may be able to give to this, etc., but I just wanted to take some step forward given my frustration at the seeming hopelessness of mere bug reports toward getting action on this front. As much as we may resist them, we all know that tests do inspire us, even normally fairly self-motivated people, and Acid is proof of that.

Again, I don't mean to be presumptuous to comparing my own test that I've barely begun to something like Acid (and which I'm not even guaranteeing I'll finish!), but just wanted to put this out there, both the little code I had as well as the idea...You are free to share or remix the code with attribution to "Brett Zamir" under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. If we get things going, hopefully we can also choose a more interesting name than "XML DOM Support Test"... :)


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