There are a couple of problems related to the handling of tests in the W3C CSS Test Suite that I'd like to outline here, providing also some hints and suggestions about how to solve them.
- Lack of a CMS
Basically, every contributor must upload his/her files through SVN. After uploading them, an email is sent to the maintainer of the suite with all the details of the upload or the changes to an existing file. Further, the maintainer must review the file, modify it, and finally flag it as approved. This is a really long and tedious task. If the CSS Test Suite used a CMS, things would be a lot faster, because:
- the CMS would provide the basic template to build a test case, allowing the contributor to edit it as it sees fit; then the template would be saved as a static file with a given URL, so that it can be further accessed, modified, moved or even deleted
- the CMS would automatically detect ill-formed markup and the like
- the CMS would allow the contributor to choose between all the additional files approved by the CSS Test Suite guidelines
- the CMS would mark the test case as pending, email the maintainer with a link to review the test file
- the CMS would allow the maintainer to keep all files and directories more organized
- Lack of references to each section of the specifications
As it's today, the W3C CSS Test Suite guidelines don't provide direct links to each section of the CSS specifications, simply because they give only generic information about how to build a test case. It would be better, instead, to provide a classification of the possible test cases by splitting them into categories (e.g. fonts, syntax, etc.) and insert a direct link to each chapter of the specifications for a given category.