From: Chuck E. <ec...@mi...> - 2001-03-20 20:03:49
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At 11:25 AM 3/20/2001 -0800, Shannon --jj Behrens wrote: >Chuck, > >Do you use the W3C's HTML and CSS validators? I find >them to be very useful (I'm actually quite strict >about DTD compliance). Also, can you clarify about >what you're testing for? If you're simply testing >that the site is producing "correct" responses, you >probably only want to set up 1 or 2 screens that >perform comprehensive diagnostics. The output from >such screens don't even have to be in HTML. They can >be in whatever format is appropriate for your spider. >This is a technique that the people over at NaviSite >use a lot (and I think it's a good one). I have used the validators a little bit and will be using them more in the future since I made an embarrassing news post for Webware that Netscape users couldn't even read. :-) Here is some of what I test for already: * no page results in a Python exception * Can the user sign in? * Can a signed in user visit all his user pages without getting a message asking him to sign in again * If a non-signed in user visits a user page * is he asked to sign in? * after doing so, does he get the original page he tried to access Also, some of my links are programmatically generated. I want to ensure they are formed correctly and that when visiting those links I get not just any page, but the page I expected. I even want to check that certain links are tagged with the right CSS style. I was also thinking of running the validator on all pages as I go, but haven't gotten there yet. Regarding, your idea of outputting another format of what I would call "structured data", that was my original thought. I could output the pages as Python dictionaries (containing lists, dictionaries, strings, etc.) which I could nab in one eval() and work with. But then I have a disconnect between what a user would really be served and what my test suite is being served. I'm not saying it wouldn't help. It would. But if I can easily suck in an XHTML file as an easy-to-use Pythonic structure then I think I can have my cake and eat it too. >As an aside, since I do output buffering in Aquarium, >I've often thought it would be cool if I ran the >output through HTML Tidy (as a filter) before >outputing it to the user. This would have the affect >of further cleaning up the HTML as well as nicely >indenting it. I might or might not have to worry >about spacing in tables--this can sometimes be a >problem. In general, it'd probably be a cool hack. Sounds like a cool idea. -Chuck |