Official W3C CSS Test Suites (original) (raw)

Interoperability

“Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged.” — IEEE

Help wanted

Interoperability is important to web designers. Better interoperability among CSS implementations means designers can write their CSS for one browser and see that it works predictably well on the other browsers. It means reducing the incompatibilities in the way CSS implementations interpret CSS.

Good test suites drive interoperability. They are a key part of making sure web standards are implemented correctly and consistently. More tests encourage more interoperability. Wrong tests drive interoperability on wrong behavior.

CSS needs good test suites! The W3C hosts the official test suites for the CSS Specifications here. Most of these test suites are still works in progress: they're incomplete and may contain errors. You can help us drive CSS interoperability on the Web by reporting errors and contributing test cases. Send questions, comments, error reports, and test submissions to the public-css-testsuite mailing list.

The “Test the Web forward” project helps organize events where you can participate and write and review tests together with others. TTWF is a project of W3C, with support from Adobe, Facebook and others.

About the Test Suites

Release phase definitions:

Final

Test suite is complete with no known or suspected bugs. At least two implementations pass, and the specification has reached Recommendation status.

Release Candidate

Test suite is complete with no known or suspected bugs. At least one implementation passes almost all tests.

Beta

Test suite has complete coverage of the spec. It may have some bugs but is expected to be mostly reliable. At least one implementation passes a majority of the tests.

Alpha

Test suite has complete if not thorough coverage of the spec, but is expected to require some revision.

Pre-Alpha

Test suite is incomplete and/or known to contain bugs at time of publication.

Obsolete

Test suite may or may not be complete, but is no longer maintained and is known to contain bugs or is otherwise not recommended for conformance testing.

Format

Information about the current test submission format and on contributing to the test suites is available on the wiki. Some test authoring guidelines are also available. Our older test suites are written to the principles of the old test suite documentation; please see the wiki for up-to-date information.

Archives and Organization

Test suites are occasionally updated, but old versions remain on-line. If you link to a test suite, you can choose whether to link to a specific, dated version or to the dynamic "current" version.

The URLs of tests for CSS3 modules are of the form:

.../CSS3/MODULE/current .../CSS3/MODULE/YYYYMMDD

where MODULE is the (capitalized) module name, e.g., "Selectors", and YYYYMMDD is a date, e.g., "20011105". The "current" link always redirects to the most recent dated test suite.

The URLs of tests for profiles are of the form:

.../PROFILE/VERSION/current .../PROFILE/VERSION/YYYYMMDD

where PROFILE is the name of a CSS profile, e.g., "Mobile" and VERSION is a version number, e.g., "1.0".