[Simpletest-support] Help (and warning): SVN now has HTMLTidy parser as default

[Marcus B. <ma...@la...>]

Hi...

This is a request for help.

The current version of SimpleTest in SVN has support for the PHP Tidy
extension loaded by default. What this means is that if the tidy C
library is installed, and the PHP Tidy extension (PECL) is installed,
then SimpleTest will use it. If not it falls back to it's own native PHP
parser.

Changing the HTML parser used in SimpleTest could have huge
ramifications. I am sure there will be slight changes of behaviour
across the board. So far I've tested it with two major code bases, and
of course the built in acceptance tests still work. So far so good, but
I'm expecting a lot of fixes are going to be needed as we get feedback.

If people could try it out and report back here, I would be most grateful.

This is pretty much the last step before a the 1.1 general release
(apart from docs).

What would be really cool, is if you could time the runs before and
after switching to the new version. You should get something like a 4X
speed improvement when running web tests against a localhost web server.
At least that's what I get, and it would be nice for this to be confirmed.

Why change the parser?
1) Speed.
2) Extra features down the line.

The extra features could include:
1) CSS selectors
2) Xpath selectors
3) Strict HTML checking of tested pages.

It also opens the door for other parser types, such as various XML
schemas (RSS?), PDF, etc.

yours, Marcus

p.s. There is also some undocumented support for REST interfaces thanks
to Mark Rickerby that is also experimental. Not documented yet either as
your feedback may result in API changes.