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Mozilla uses a scripted test system where the lifecycle of a test file load is basically: 1) Before onload fires, the test calls SimpleTest.waitForExplicitFinish() to counter an unfortunate default that assumes that the test is done when onload fires. 2) The test calls assertion functions an arbitrary numbers of times. The assertion functions have nice short names like ok(bool, "message") or is(value1, value2, "message"). 3) The test signals that it is done by calling SimpleTest.finish() The HTML WG test harness requires much more boilerplate. Please make it so the test writer only needs to call nice simple methods like ok() and is() and then call something like finish() when the test is done without wrappers like test(), async_test() or step(). It would be acceptable to have to call an initialization method like SimpleTest.waitForExplicitFinish(), but it would be even nicer not to have to do that.
I don't think we need this anymore -- we now wrap testharness.js tests nicely enough. <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647323>