Microformats test-suite concept

I have been working on a concept for a new microformats test-suite. I need a comprehensive test-suite before I can move the development of UfXtract forward. Rather than just build something in isolation I thought it would be nice to find a way to share this work with the community.

I have written two POSH patterns “testsuite” and “testfixture”. They follow the principles of microformats design:

For example go to http://ufxtract.com/testsuite/hcard/1.0/

The earliest tests for hcard used vcards to describe the expected output. As the community has moved forward it has designed microformats which are independent of external specification. So this test-suite is designed around the concept of a standardised data structure. In this case, expressed in JSON, but they could be converted into XPaths to test XML or other languages.

I have started to build a small console app, which will spider the HTML and create NUnit/C# class files for my build tests. Although this is specific to my own parsers development, it should be easy to do the same for other programming languages and projects.

Parsing “testsuite” and “testfixture”.
I have already setup UfXtract to parse these patterns into JSON/XML. It would not take much for other microformats parser developers to construct profiles for these POSH patterns.

Here is an example of the output.
ttp://lab.backnetwork.com/ufXtract/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fufxtract.com%2Ftestsuite%2Fhcard%2F1.0%2Fhcard1.htm&format=test-fixture&output=json

 

The Testrunner

If you go to http://ufxtract.com/testsuite/hcard/1.0/hcard1.htm and press Alt X you can see a working demonstration of the testrunner.

I have observed that most parser developers are using comparative testing as their main tool to quickly understand how the complex rules and optimizations are applied. So I have built a JavaScript Testrunner which allows for simple comparative testing between parsers.

It uses a number of techniques to standardise both access to the parsers API’s and the JSON output. Please note that at this stage the JSON standardisation process can cause a test to be marked as failed when it could be judged to have passed. Most of the current differences in parser output are down to whether a value is stored as single property or an array of properties.

At the moment the Testrunner is only working with the testfixure , it would not take much to extend the Testrunner to run a whole test-suite.

I would love to add Operator and other parsers to the Testrunner.

 

Proof of concept

This is very early proof of concept stuff. What I would like to ask is a number of questions before moving it forward.

Published 03 May 2008 12:14

Comments

1 Dan Brickley
This is great stuff :) Very good to see progress on this.

Can you say a bit more about how this would allow tests for mixed-microformat data, eg. XFN and hCard in one page? Or distinguishing a representative hCard?
Posted 03 May 2008 14:25

2 Glenn Jones
Thanks Dan, it’s taken me a while to get around to this work. I am hopeful that the microformats community will like the approach and want to see it move forward.

I think it will be possible to build test-suites around more complex patterns such as the combined xfn-hcard or distinguishing a representative hcard from a collection.

Realistically we do first need a standardised data schema for describing microformats parsers output. Once that’s in place, we will be able to build complex test-suites which can be used to refine new ideas by replicating common samantic patterns. I am going post about standardised data schemas soon.

Once I have got some feedback from the community I will start adding all my tests, which inculdes a series on xfn-hcard and representative hcards
Posted 03 May 2008 17:43

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