This Activity Proposal is Public.
The structure of this Activity Proposal follows Section 5.6 of the W3C Process Document.
For years, W3C has been testing technologies in various Working Groups. Each specification follows its own methods for testing the underlying technology and no coordination between Working Groups is happening for testing methods. However technologies like HTML, CSS, or APIs need to be tested in the same user agents, combining some of them sometimes. Efforts have been successful in the past in the Mobile Web Initiative but the prevalence of the Web platform across various devices is increasing the needs to ensure better coordination and interoperability between Web technologies. The work of the Quality Assurance activity produced guidelines and checklist for specifications. The role of the Web Testing activity is to develop the testing mechanisms, outreach activities, and collateral materials for testing Web technologies.
The Web Testing Activity would be part of the Interaction Domain.
For the past 10 years, W3C has been developing test suites for the purpose of demonstrating interoperable implementations of each specification when requesting the Director to approve a Proposed Recommendation transition. For example, one of the most recent specifications, CSS 2.1, has a test suite of around 9000 tests. Each Working Group has been developing test suites and generating test results in their own ways. Using ad-hoc processes and testing methods, most of them did not attempt to reuse existing methods or approaches. In the past, the Mobile Web Initiative did produce a series of integrated test suites for the Mobile platform and this kind of effort needs to be generalized across W3C Working Groups.
With the new wave of developments in the Open Web Platform, the increase diversity in devices, and the increase in demands for real interoperability between the technologies, it is important for W3C to step up its efforts and coordinate the energies in testing new technologies like HTML5, CSS3, ARIA, etc. There is a strong need for Web technologies to work out "out of the box" on any devices (Desktop, TV, mobile, tablet) and reliably in more consumer oriented use cases, including accessibility.
The intent of the acitivty is to enable testing of the various facets of Web agents: rendering, scripting, animation, performance, user interaction, or integration with platform APIs, such as Accessiblity APIs.
Several groups have been pressing for this:
Many of them are. Many implementors are already Members.
The testing project, which started earlier this year, already gather several implementers and organizations interested in the effort, especially in the web browser, mobile and accessibility areas.
Each user agent implementation has already its own way of testing their platform. Several Working Groups have been developing test suites and producing test results. The CSS Working Group is probably the most advanced group in terms of managing tests for example. Several test methods have been developed in the past few years, such as Mozilla reftests or Selenium.
Several efforts have been ongoing in this area but no coordination has been done.
The interest in new technologies like HTML5 or CSS3 has increased the demand to ensure proper interoperability.
As mentioned earlier, several W3C Working Groups have been developing test suites in the past.
See the respective charters.
See the respective charters.
Several specifications are scheduled to be completed in the next 12 months or 2 years. The HTML5 specification is scheduled to become a W3C Recommendation by 2014, with the first initial release of the test suite by early 2012.
No overlap.
None.
Yes, see the respective charters.
The proposed Groups would be coordinated via the chairs and team contacts participation in the Hypertext Coordination group.
This proposal is for consideration by the Membership according to section 5.6 of the Process Document.
The resource requirements for this Activity include:
The proposed total staff FTE for this Activity is 1.4 FTE, including ressources from the Testing project.
See the section on Patent Disclosures in the WG charter.
The Activity will run for two years, until 30 June 2013.
The Lead for the Testing Activity is Michael Smith (W3C) <mike@w3.org>