An IE7 CSS test suite
Sunday, August 20th, 2006
Chris Wilson, group program manager for the Internet Explorer platform team at Microsoft, recently referred in his blog to an e-mail conversation we had when my standards support resource was fairly new and undeveloped. He wrote in his blog post:
Most unfortunately, there are no more details on many of the problems David encountered, or test cases that my team can test against. When I contacted David a year or so ago, he couldn’t give me any further details, so I’m not even sure how we make progress against that site. Solid test cases we can access and bug reporting would help
Back when he first contacted me, I admit that my tables were quite vague and not nearly as useful as I believe they are today. I have since done a lot of work trying to make my wording in the support descriptions accurate and informative enough to easily fashion test cases from them. But I also recognize that having such test cases readily available would definitely help.
Therefore, I have developed a (non-exhaustive) set of tests for many of the most common IE7 CSS bugs described in my support tables. The mass test case is made to be easy to read and the issues are documented in the source.
Some CSS issues, such as with the cursor property, obviously can’t fit into this format very easily, so I left them out of the tests. But overall, I think this test case covers most of the important issues of immediate concern. Once Internet Explorer supports :before and :after (in some version after IE7), there will be many more features to test.
I will send this test suite to Chris Wilson and continue to participate through the Internet Explorer feedback system.